Fools

by Joan Silber

  Adinah’s parents didn’t have our phone number, but sometimes they called her at the restaurant where she worked. One night she told me, “You know what they called to tell me one more time? I was helping the enemies of the Jews by denying who I was, and I was only kidding myself if I thought otherwise. They worked their way into it at the end of the conversation.”

  “They waited that long?”

  She let out a little mirthless laugh. I put my arms around her for comfort. It was terrible to me that parents, of all people, could be this cruel to someone as gentle as Adinah. Who never said a really mean word about anyone. Who covered her eyes at any bloodshed on TV. I was glad she had me, at least, her personal fortress to lean on. “They’ll get used to your being this way,” I said.

  “No, they won’t,” she said.

  I’d known waitresses who made good livings, but Adinah, who worked lunches, was not one of them. The rent came from me, which I didn’t mind. We were managing fine, until my rust bucket of a Volkswagen broke down on the way home from work and I had to pay to get it towed and then it needed a new transmission. I was sure that when the end of the month came I would somehow have enough cash on hand for the rent, and I told Adinah it was no problemo, but then as the days went by I saw we had a bit of an emergency on our hands. What surprised me in all this was Adinah.

  “You have to do something,” she said. “You better do something.”

  “I know that,” I said.

  “We can’t lose the apartment. Why did we ever get it if you’re just going to lose it?”

  “I’m doing my best, baby,” I said.

  “I think I believe you,” she said.

  The last thing I expected from my doe-eyed girl was to be pressured. Was she venal at heart, looking for what my mother would call a lunch ticket? This made me remember she’d been eating almost nothing, to help save us, and I understood she was simply scared stiff. But I was still pissed at her.

  On the other hand, I knew what I had to do. I called my friend Art, who got in touch with a guy named Spud, and with my last paycheck I bought as much as I could of this high-quality Michoacán grass he had just gotten in. And I wasn’t short on customers—from my office, from Adinah’s restaurant, from our Sufi group. I got us through the crisis just fine, and the two of us had laughing fits watching TV commercials stoned when we were home celebrating the rent payment. The Frito Bandito was pretty funny. Adinah, with her head on my shoulder, snorted and hooted into my neck.

  But I didn’t like it. You had to be a certain way when you were buying in bulk. You had to drive to some creepy bungalow in the middle of nowhere, walk in quiet as a cowboy, sampling a joint and muttering Nice, very nice, rubbing the dope between your fingers, making a few worldly wisecracks, shaking the hand of some joker with guns in the house, watching your back every second. Then ride the highway with your radioactive cargo. You were talking yourself into thinking you were one sly dude with balls of steel, you were no one to mess with. This is why people get hurt if they surprise a robber. He’s busy being a robber. It’s why they have to rev up soldiers to be soldiers.

  I kept those kilos of dope wrapped in a quilt in a closet in the tiny room Adinah used for meditation. I didn’t want a single one of our many customers to see how much I had. We hadn’t lived in the building that long, and a grandmotherly type across the hall said, “You get a lot of company these days.”

  “The door is always open to our friends,” I said.

  “Is that a fact?” she said.

  So I had to worry about her too. Who knew who she was? All she had to do was make a phone call. I took it out on Adinah, who had wheedled me into this. “Are you comfortable on that sofa?” I said. “Maybe you want us to get a more expensive sofa.”

  “Me?” she said. “Not me. I like the opposite. I left the land of white satin sofas and plastic slipcovers. That’s why I’m here.”

  “You’re still a princess,” I said.

  “Of what?”

  “Like the princess and the pea.”

  “Where’s the pea?”

  “If I left a piece of pepperoni on the sofa, you would leap into the air.”

  “At least I know what I think,” she said. “Some people go through life with no guidelines whatsoever.”

  “Do you hear what you sound like? You could be Miss Prissy-Ass, my fifth-grade teacher.

  “Is that how you see me?” she said.

  “You’re too afraid. I want you to be not afraid.”

  “What a shit-head you are,” she said. She was tearful too, tight-mouthed and frowning.

  “You don’t want to be free?”

  “Every sleazebag says that when a woman won’t sleep with him.”

  “Excuse me for offending you,” I said.

  It went on like that and it didn’t get better either. She must have wondered what she was doing with a creep like me. All her innocence, all her young-girl nervousness, made me coarser sometimes.

  But all couples had fights, didn’t they? Especially when money was in the mix. A day later, Adinah announced that she was taking on more hours in that hippie beanery where she worked, despite my telling her she didn’t have to, what was the point.

  “I want to. A few extra pennies, okay?”

  “You kids are doing so well,” my mother said. “It lifts my spirits to talk to you.”

  Oh, my mother. She still had to see Luís every day at work, which couldn’t have been fun, and then—guess what?—my father had turned up at her door, looking like hell and needing a loan, just a little bail-out to tide him over. Which she gave him. I said, “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.” And then she wanted to talk to Adinah, and I could hear Adinah saying into the phone, “Generosity is always cool. Name a religion that doesn’t say that.”

  What did my mother know about religion? Bubkes. She still had some Yiddish but no theology. What I really wanted to hear was how my father was doing. “He’s okay but he’s a mess,” my mother said. “He always was but now he looks it.”

  Afterward, Adinah and I talked about whether the truth would out, no matter what, once you got older; whether your physical form stopped being able to hide a thing. Plenty of older people lied to themselves—perky movie stars and oily politicians, sure of their charm and persuasiveness, sure their expensive plastic surgery actually worked—but their faces were so obvious. I myself was hiding a few things from the past (Adinah didn’t know all) and hoped to someday become the entirely straightforward figure I only half resembled now.

  And what about Adinah? In some ways she was guileless—she told customers at work which items were overpriced, she announced, “I just farted,” when we were on the bus—but she was also veiled and silent. Often. And why not? Why shouldn’t she keep some of her to herself? I wanted us both to have privacy.

  In May, we celebrated a year in our fantabulous apartment by having a picnic in Golden Gate Park. We’d both spent time in the park at antiwar demonstrations and it was somehow especially sweet to be using it for a more idle purpose. I was halfway through a surprisingly delicious spiced tempeh sandwich when Adinah said, “You know, I think I might be pregnant.”

  Her little tendrils of hair were gleaming in the sun, and I thought, She looks about twelve, it’s not possible. (When was her last period? I couldn’t fucking remember. And did I know when she used her diaphragm? I did not.) Mostly I thought: What? “Are you sure?” I said.

  Everything in her face changed. “Forget I mentioned it,” she said. “Never mind.”

  I wanted to forget about it. I didn’t want to deal with it until I absolutely had to. In college one of my girlfriends had had an abortion. That was kind of normal. Adinah wasn’t normal; she was from the planet of pure feelings, a place with a molten core.

  She was packing up the picnic stuff, the paper cups and the thermos and the box of chocolate cupcakes we hadn’t eaten. She was getting up to leave.

  “Adinah!” I said.

  “Never mind,” she said. S
he had the loaded tote bag over her arm.

  “Sit down. Hey. We’re talking,” I said. “We’re talking.”

  When she sat down, I said, “So how do you feel?” as if I were some kind of goddamn counselor. I knew how she felt.

  Oh, she’d guessed for a few weeks, so she’d had time (she said, making her voice go quieter) to get used to the idea that this was supposed to happen. What did that mean, “supposed to”? My father believed in the great hand of fate and look where it got him. “What about free will?” I said.

  “Stop it,” she said.

  I could soften, if I wanted, or I could harden myself against her. I saw I could go either way, and I didn’t want to go anywhere. I could imagine myself single once more, back in the world as the stone-hearted person I probably really was. I didn’t exactly want to picture a baby (boy or girl?). Especially one I might argue to abort.

  “I’ll have it with or without you, you know,” she said.

  “Give me time,” I said, which enraged her.

  But she did wait—where was she going?—while I tormented myself with the prospect of deserting her. We didn’t even talk during these days. When I came out of it, as if I’d been fasting, I saw clearly. I was staying for this. Who was I kidding?

  I thought Adinah would never entirely emerge from being mad at me, but she mostly did. Twenty times a day we said to each other, We’ll be fine and It’ll be so great. By the time we got to, Timothy if it’s a boy and Rebecca if it’s a girl, the shock of it felt like a drug I liked.

  One of her friends said that Adinah looked like a deer when she was pregnant. Her small, deep-eyed face, her slender arms and legs, the swelling bodily curve of her. She carried herself nimbly, with that slight sway she developed. I was the galumphing mate, trucking in supplies, fixing up the room. She nagged me about getting the shelves just right.

  Adinah’s parents did not react well when she tried to begin by first telling them she was living with this guy who was me. Whatever they said (she didn’t want to tell me) was so scathing, so full-tilt, so heavy-duty, that she halted the conversation right there and decided not to speak to them again. Ever? “You have no idea,” she said. We had a nondenominational wedding, with a bunch of great Sufi musicians really wailing, and my wildly enthusiastic mother in attendance.

  I had maybe four good years with Adinah. Becky the baby was a trip, as we kept saying. We didn’t know what hit us, but some of it was great. I was one of those fathers who couldn’t stop photographing her every yawn and tiny toenail. Adinah was used to kids—she was the oldest of six—and she got strong and fussy in a way I hadn’t expected. In one of the pictures I took then she looked like a pioneer mother, chin up, apron on, babe tucked into the crook of her arm.

  We tried bringing Becky with us to our Sufi group—Adinah wanted to show how cute she was—but the kid took an immediate dislike to the music, and Adinah had to take her outside when she started bawling. Adinah looked martyred and dismal, standing in the hall jiggling the baby against her shoulder. So I made the noble gesture of staying home with Becky on the nights Adinah felt a need to retune her consciousness to the eternal. I was sort of lapsing out of Sufism by then anyway.

  Around this time, I talked Adinah into letting me photograph her stepping out of the tub. Nothing lurid, but I took the film to a friend’s darkroom, no Kodak lab for these. “I look so pale,” Adinah said when she saw them, but she liked them, I could tell. They had the abstraction of black-and-white, and in the arcs and mounds and dimplings, the blurred aureoles and dusky triangle, Adinah’s personal flesh was elevated, made marble. We were otherwise in a morass of baby poop and bananas and spit-up. We never went out, what would we pay a sitter with? Our sex life was still okay, more than okay, but not all that frequent, and the pictures did us good, they felt like proof. I may have needed them more than Adinah did.

  At my office I was such a pest with my baby portraits that some supervisor decided I should go photograph clients, to show them working productively at the jobs we’d nagged them into getting. I loved this assignment—J. Perez putting a pizza in the oven, A. LaMarca sticking her butt out to lean across a file cabinet, X. Jones leading the hokey-pokey at a day-care center. When a neighborhood newspaper picked up some of the day-care shots, I was so thrilled that I kept bothering the editor to buy more photos of mine. A million stories in the naked city. I got a great one of two guys fighting over their place in line at an Elvis memorial—eyes wild, jackets flailing, and they both had Elvis hairdos—and this was such a hit that a real newspaper (a major paper, if not our best) bought it, and eleven months later I talked them into a staff job.

  I had two things going for me: I knew how to handle myself on the street and I had enough cool to move in fast for a shot and get it before it was gone. Sometimes they sent me out with the police reporter, when they needed someone in a hurry. Blood and gore. Me, holding my flashing camera over a facedown body, with cops all around making terrible jokes. All in a day’s work.

  Adinah hated hearing my stories. “Don’t tell me about it,” she said. “I can’t stand it when people get all hip about how close they can get to evil. Like their numbness is something to brag about. It’s really kind of revolting.”

  She had a point, but I had a point too: Didn’t she want to know what the world was?

  “That isn’t knowledge,” she said. “How can you say that?”

  There happened to be any number of women I could show off for if Adinah thought I was full of shit. I flirted with these women, in the newspaper office and on the street, but I didn’t, as they say, do anything. I had sold my freedom for love and I was keeping the bargain. I lived with two creatures I loved, didn’t I?

  Adinah started talking to her parents again. “At least I don’t have to put on a midi skirt and long sleeves and a snood over my hair to talk to them,” she said. Sometimes she put Becky on the phone. And me. Hello, Gerard, how are you? Hello, we are fine, they said. And a happy holiday to you. What stiffness in their voices, what years of woe. They were brighter with Becky, whom I could hear gurgling at them. In their photos they looked entirely ordinary and benign—her mother’s wig was the same style as Rosalynn Carter’s hairdo and her father was smiling under his black plastic eyeglasses, with a yarmulke hardly bigger than a cookie on his balding head. How used to themselves they were, how forever stunned to lose Adinah. In our Sufi group, they had a song with a lot of percussion that was supposed to mean, The paths of love are long and complicated. It wasn’t human love the song was about either, which made me think all of it was too fucking difficult.

  I came home one day with another story from work. A sanitation cop went to give a storekeeper a ticket for illegal garbage on the street, and the big bag of garbage turned out to be the guy’s wife, wrapped in plastic, sleeping off a drunk in the rain. A wife he hadn’t seen in five years! I got a shot of her standing up and waving like the queen. Adinah said, “That’s pretty sad. You don’t think that’s funny, do you?”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “The other guys did.”

  “Oh, yeah. They’re still laughing.”

  “I knew it.”

  “I like my work,” I said. “Do you mind?”

  I knew she’d hate that story, so why did I parade it? She sighed. She’d taken to not bothering to argue with me, which wasn’t a good sign.

  I was plenty attracted to certain other women—there was a reporter on the paper who reminded me of Sandie, a fast-talking redhead with a very great body. When we were hanging out at the coffee machine, giving each other the eye, I’d think, It’s not worth it, I don’t want to make a mess of everything, I have Adinah.

  In the end it was Adinah who left me. Not for a man, but for a name. In her Sufi group she took on a spiritual guide (you were supposed to do this), a woman in her forties whom Adinah called Tasnim, which meant “Spring of Paradise.” Her real name was Carolyn (all the initiates had names their guides gave them) and she was a plumpish woman with a sof
t voice and blinking eyes. I’d met her at the group long ago, and it surprised me that Adinah picked someone so uncharismatic. Adinah said I’d always gone to Sufism as another drug, a way to cultivate certain states. So was that wrong? “You didn’t want to go very far,” Adinah said.

  She was right that I didn’t buy the God part. “Well, that’s the whole thing,” Adinah said. “And it’s not like a single Person. It’s the whole Big Enchilada that everything else is inside of. You know?”

  I was still interested in this, but I’d stopped needing it. I didn’t have the same hunger to get out of myself, now that my days ran on act-first-think-later and blood-and-guts and what felt like success. I was a fair-weather friend to religion. Adinah thought I was shallow.

  I was not happy to know this, but we’d always had ups and downs. All the work of taking care of Becky could make our bed a place more for sleep than for love, but sometimes Adinah had gorgeous revivals of feeling. If I was patient, if I could wait while she got our girl to sleep, if she wasn’t too tired, a deeper hunger swelled in her. The frank physicality of motherhood seemed to take her to new frontiers. Lucky me, I’d thought. Okay, then some long lulls took hold of us. Nothing newsworthy in that. And for some time I was doing the male version of going through the motions. My body rose to excitement, but the rest of me didn’t much care. I kept on because I wanted the form of it, I wanted us to be following the ways of a family. As far as I knew, Adinah (who must’ve noticed) moved with me in that spirit. I thought we agreed.

  The Sufi name her guide gave her was Satya, which meant “Sincere” or “Truthful.” “Yes!” I said. “You are. That’s a great name.”

  Someone with this name, Adinah thought, wasn’t someone who could live in our house. What?