Elizabeth understood. She never tried to see John Vain in prison, but she wrote to him every Saturday for as long as he was incarcerated and signed each letter, Hoping we’ll see each other soon. Your friend, Elizabeth.
Angela, who was away at Princeton, felt betrayed.
* * *
She was already angry at John Vain for his recklessness, and she also blamed Elizabeth for not leaning harder on him to insure the restaurant and set his financial affairs in order. That’s what he had hired her to do, after all, even if it was a pity hiring. He trusted her and relied on her and all she gave him in return were a few (okay, more than a few) warnings. She should have pressed the point till he took action. Instead, she wrote notes and gave verbal reports, copied relevant sections of the small print on the back of loan applications from Bank United and left them, circled, on John Vain’s desk, brought it up when he came by for a social visit, which, to Angela, “basically means you dropped the ball.”
Even then, Angela thought she knew better than everyone else.
She had flown in from New Jersey for John Vain’s sentencing, and she decided after ten minutes that the public defender who represented him was incompetent and uncaring. She was a senior in college, majoring in English because she wanted to be a reporter for CNN, “a Jewish Christiane Amanpour with a better haircut,” she explained to Nilou. Amanpour had achieved international stardom three years earlier because of her coverage of the first Gulf War when Saddam invaded Kuwait. Physically, she bore a definite resemblance to Angela: they were both tall and big-boned, with booming voices that were a few notches too loud. And they both spoke with a great deal of authority on subjects in which they had no real expertise.
Angela had already done a three-month internship at CNN in Atlanta at the end of her junior year, and she was prepared to go back and work for below living wages if they’d have her, but she was so outraged by the shabby representation John Vain received from his court-appointed attorney, so certain after that experience that the legal system was skewed in favor of the rich, she went back to Princeton and signed up for the LSAT. She had had a full scholarship for Princeton; for law school, she took out a loan.
She would remind people of this later, when Elizabeth became the wealthiest individual (as opposed to family) among Iranian Jews, and people forgot that she had not always been rich, that she and Angela had struggled for years, bought groceries from Lebanese- and Iranian-owned shops because the prices were lower, and clothes from Goodwill or National Council of Jewish Women’s thrift stores; that Angela and Nilou shared all their textbooks, then passed them down to Neda; that Zeeba and Elizabeth shared a car. But that wasn’t the hard part of being poor.
After the first couple of years when she depended on John Vain’s generosity and good references for an income, Elizabeth had taken a job with a Korean import business in Toy Town on 5th Street. She worked twelve-hour days as warehouse supervisor, keeping track of every ten-cent fire truck and twenty-five-cent princess gown and tiara from the moment it arrived from overseas till it was sold and delivered to the retail shops up and down the district. The warehouse was dusty and windowless and without heating or air-conditioning. She only took breaks if there was time, and ate standing up most days, but she kept the job because her bosses realized she did three people’s work for the price of one. She took no vacations, and asked for a half-day off only when she had to go to Angela’s school for parent-teacher conferences.
The hard part of being poor, Angela would later remind people if they tried to suggest that she had had it easy growing up, was the time she spent away from Elizabeth while she worked in Toy Town. It was having to turn to Zeeba, not her own mother, for the kinds of emotional comfort most children get from a parent.
Even harder than that was having to lose John Vain without being able to do a thing about it, because neither she nor Elizabeth had money to lend to him or with which to hire a private attorney for him.
“We let him down,” she told Elizabeth, “and now, he’s abandoned us.”
__________________
No sooner had John Vain disappeared from their lives than Zeeba Raiis got her husband back.
In 1982, Dr. Raiis had been spared a summary execution through the interference of Muhammad Jadid al-Islam, who took $50,000 from Zeeba’s brothers in Iran to arrange Dr. Raiis’s release, then reneged and asked for an additional $30,000. He waited ten days after the doctor was freed, then went to the authorities and pointed him out as one who had gotten away. Many a broken rib and $120,000 later, Dr. Raiis was returned to the empty apartment where he would linger for the next five years.
He had to wait until 1989, when the war with Iraq ended and the regime, reeling from its losses, turned its attention inward and away from so-called antirevolution, anti-Islam, anti-God-and-country taaghootis, to be allowed to leave the country on a thirty-day visa. Even then, he didn’t go to Los Angeles because he couldn’t face his family. Emotionally ravaged and physically impoverished, he didn’t think he would survive the first hour with Zeeba, or the encounter with his children. He knew that Zeeba worked part-time as a teacher’s aide in a Santa Monica preschool, that the children had weekend and after-school jobs, that they all lived in a rundown apartment on the edge of Beverly Hills so the kids could go to the schools, and that they had no health insurance.
What did he—the man, the provider, the head of the family—have to say by way of justifying the decisions he had made and that had brought them all to this point?
His best friend from medical school, who had left Iran in 1978, was chief of surgery at Emory Hospital in Atlanta; the friend’s wife, also Iranian, was a professor at the university. Together they had promised they would do everything in their power to help Dr. Raiis start a practice or find work in the medical field. He went to them first.
He failed the board licensing exam twice in Atlanta, then followed another friend to New York and failed there. He failed the exam in Baltimore, Ann Arbor, and Chicago—all cities where his former colleagues had reestablished themselves in major hospitals and research centers while he—recipient of the medal of honor from Her Majesty, Empress Farah Pahlavi, for selfless service to the country—couldn’t get so much as a license to practice. In Iran, he had been the top of his class every year, recognized as the smartest and the most deserving of success. In America, he was only as good as a test score.
Take away a man’s faith in what he has known to be true, Dr. Raiis’s friends whispered outside of his earshot, and what you’ll have is a cold clod of earth where no new life will grow.
* * *
In 1994 he arrived in Los Angeles played out and defeated. Like so many other men who were forced into early retirement by the revolution, who became strangers to their children through cultural displacement and dependent on their wives for their livelihood, he might have shrunk physically and emotionally a little more every day, become a fixture that his family would step around on their way out the door.
But this was America—home of second acts, never mind it hadn’t turned out that way for Dr. Raiis. He was damned if he’d let himself become a burden on anyone.
He took a job at Benny Produce, a hole-in-the-wall Iranian grocery store next to Pico Cleaners (environmentally friendly, delivery available seven days a week, and the owners speak Persian, French, and Italian). His coworkers were a pair of teenage boys from El Salvador who didn’t know a word of English but got by just fine in Persian. Dr. Raiis made a point of greeting them every day with utmost respect and formality. He did the same with the customers who knew him from Iran, shaking hands and inquiring about the health of their children, and explaining—though no one asked—that he was here because the barriers to entry into the medical profession were impossibly high, and the system was slanted toward the young and the native English speaker, even if they didn’t have a tenth of his experience or expertise, and had never even heard of, much less diagnosed or treated, the kinds of illnesses he had identified and cured over t
he course of his own career. He was here, at Benny Produce, because he wasn’t ashamed of hard work, wasn’t about to become a liability to his wife and daughters.
Customers who remembered the days when Dr. Raiis had saved children’s lives and received royal commendations tried very hard to disguise their shock and pity every time they ran into him at Benny. Old friends who saw him waiting for the bus pulled over in their expensive German cars and pretended this was all very normal—a brilliant physician in a formal suit taking the bus to a small strip mall where he would spend the day stacking boxes of fresh coriander and fenugreek. Who says only the down-and-out take the bus in LA?
They would drop him off at his destination and drive away, still pretending there was nothing wrong with this picture until he had disappeared in their rearview mirrors and they could let out a sigh, weigh the extent of the tragedy, and know that, but for the grace of God, this could have been their own fate.
__________________
Even the prison guards, who had seen a strange person or two in their time, couldn’t stop staring at Hal Zemorrodi when he came to visit John Vain. He arrived in the shape of a tall, skinny man with olive skin, loose dentures, and not a strand of hair visible on his face or body. His eyeglasses were so smeared with fingerprints that it was a wonder he could see through them at all. He addressed everyone as sir and ma’am as if at a White House diplomatic dinner, carried himself like a physics professor who happened to have submerged his hands in motor oil for a decade or two. He told the guard who accompanied him to the visiting room that he had driven for six days straight all the way from New York, sleeping only three hours a night, just to see “one of my two oldest and dearest friends.” While he waited for John Vain in the visiting room, he sat with his knees crossed and his jacket buttoned up, staring at the metal door through which the prisoners walked in. When he finally saw John Vain emerge, he sprang up so that the chair toppled over behind him, took three long steps with his arms wide open, wrapped them around John Vain, and started to sob like a grieving mother.
“I should never have left you,” he kept saying through the cascade of tears and saliva. “It’s my fault you’re here.”
* * *
The night he left Lucky 99 for good, Hal drove to the first freeway on-ramp he came upon, and kept driving till he ran out of gas. The next morning he sold his car to the owner of a gas station and used the money to buy a bus ticket that would take him across the country till he ran out of land.
He was desperate to forget not only his failed invention but everything he had ever known about science and engineering and all the lies he had been taught in school or had told himself since.
“I wanted so much to lose the ambition, and instead aspire to what I’m capable of reaching,” he confessed to John Vain. “I think I might have done it, accepted my limitations, at least in part, enough to be able to sleep through a night without waking up to go through the numbers in my head.”
Then he paused, sucked his lips into his mouth, and scrutinized John Vain’s face. He had lost weight—at least twenty pounds—since they last saw each other. He seemed like a man who’d been stripped of his soul and handed something ill-fitting and defective. But he still had the old kindness, the extraordinary empathy, the fatal innocence.
“I can tell you this because I know you’ll understand,” Hal said, measuring each word. He threw a surreptitious look at the guard who had been watching him since he arrived, leaned a few inches forward, and lowered his voice. “She wouldn’t let me.”
They were sitting in a bare, badly lit room with cement walls and bulletproof windows, in a gray building in the middle of a compound built of concrete and metal, surrounded by a vast, empty plain and, beyond it, long, empty highways. They were there because they had believed, each in his own way, too much in their own fantasies. Yet like a mechanical brain in a science fiction film, Hal had chased John Vain to Lompoc, only to share with him yet another tall tale: “she” was Elizabeth.
There he was, in 1982, asleep in a sweaty, unwashed Amtrak car through Texas, when the entire cabin was inundated by the smell of the sea as if Elizabeth herself had walked in. It was a rainy night and Hal had been dreaming of his charts, so he told himself he had imagined the scent and went back to sleep.
There he was again, in Colorado, Philadelphia, Maryland, when every rain brought with it the scent of Elizabeth. Not as though she was chasing him or even reaching out; she was just there, like a fixture on the landscape of his consciousness, at once removed and immovable—a slight, quiet silhouette that nevertheless reflected all that Hal had first cherished and was now trying to leave. It reminded him of his childhood home that had been demolished in the war, his parents who had died without seeing him one more time, his youthful friendship with the strange Jewish girl no one else understood, the nights of flowers and caviar and beautiful women who tossed their hair back when they laughed in Lucky 99, the dream of creation.
The farther he went, the more present the scent became.
* * *
In the visitation room at Lompoc, the guards stared at John Vain and Hal as if expecting an unpleasant surprise. The youngest one, who had walked Hal in from the check-in desk, put a hand on the holster of his gun and looked ready to pounce on the two men in case one of them moved to detonate a hidden bomb or throw a teargas grenade. It’s true that, it being a minimum-security prison, the guards at Lompoc were starved for action. Still, while neither Hal nor John Vain would have struck any reasonable person as the break-out-of-Alcatraz type, there was something unusually charged and frenetic about Hal’s speech and movements, like a person who has seen Mary, mother of Christ, walk off a billboard on Sunset Strip and cross the street dressed only in a halo.
John Vain himself had encountered quite a few of those types at Lucky 99. They usually turned up around one a.m. on Saturdays and often had to be sent home in a cab because they didn’t remember where they had left their car or if they even had one. Most of them had drifted out of some club—the Rainbow, or Whiskey—after snorting one too many lines of powder in the bathroom. A few were genuine lunatics who could afford their fantasies thanks to generous trust funds. One or two really had seen a naked woman crossing the street and mistaken her for the Holy Mother.
John Vain had made sure that the “visionary” strays who turned to him for refuge were well fed and sufficiently hydrated. Sometimes, he drove them to an emergency room for a quick detox or a seventy-two-hour hold; at other times, he paid for the taxi ride. The way he saw it, a man was entitled to his delusions no matter what the reality. Maybe that’s why he believed Hal’s story now.
* * *
For years after Hal disappeared, Elizabeth had struggled alone with the blueprints for his heat-detecting radar. She told John Vain she blamed herself for depriving Hal of his one great love. She had thought she was helping him find the way; she had not expected him to abandon the project and his life in LA altogether. In the beginning, she wanted to keep the idea alive for when Hal came back to reclaim it. After a few months, when he couldn’t be found and the police wouldn’t classify him as a missing person and therefore initiate a real search, she felt she owed it to Hal’s legacy if he were dead or to his memory if he were alive to make something of his life’s work. Before she knew it, she was sucked in and entangled in the task of solving the puzzle just because it was there.
One day in 1989, she had called John Vain much too early in the morning and announced, in that bright voice of hers that made him quiver every time he heard it, “Hal was right; it can be done.”
* * *
John Vain wanted to tell Hal that he knew about that scent because it haunted him as well, swept into his 8' x 10' cell with every rain, and filled him, once again, with joy. Instead, he dropped his hands between his legs and hunched over as if in pain, tried to keep his voice from breaking, and said, “She’s been waiting for you. She has something you’ll want to see.”
__________________
&nbs
p; Neda was nineteen years old, a freshman at Berkeley, when Raphael’s Son picked her out from a pool of unfortunates who might become his wife.
He had been thinking about marriage for some time, not because he particularly wanted a family or cared about becoming a father, but because it—marriage—would be a good way for him to make inroads into the community. He did like women, especially tall, flat-chested ones, which ruled out most Iranian girls and, in LA (home of DDD bra sizes courtesy of some silicone manufacturer) also ruled out most Americans. In the beginning, when he had just arrived and was living in Westwood, he had neither the courage nor the social skills to approach any female. His mouth went dry and his heart shrank every time he walked by an attractive woman or even saw one on TV. Often, he would go into department stores at the Century City mall and just linger on the cosmetics or jewelry floors, pretending to look for a gift when all he wanted was to stand close to the painted and perfumed sales girls.
He got a much warmer reception from them than he did from their mostly gay, cruelly disapproving male counterparts in the men’s section. He realized women liked a man who shopped for gifts; they judged him by how fondly he spoke of his fictional girlfriend or how eagerly he spent his money. Still, he had no idea how to express interest in any of them or what he would do when they rejected him. The truth was, the only women he had ever had sex with or even kissed were professionals who made the first move and were happy to offer as many compliments and as much affirmation as he paid for. In Iran, he had started with the prostitutes in Shahr-eh No—New Town—and graduated to more mainstream types after the revolution when all the hookers became “temporary wives.” He never “married” anyone for longer than two hours, and never contemplated taking a permanent wife who might be an encumbrance in America.
But the loneliness began to get him.
The Luminous Heart of Jonah S. Page 26