by Joan Silber
But I put off writing to her that I’d had a change of heart. I walked around with my heart as it was, unsightly and hidden. I had to work my butt off and run all over the city as usual, aiming my camera at suspects holding their jackets over their heads and lawyers acting earnest. All of this made me more infuriated with Adinah. She always thought she was above all this crap, too good to go near it. But she wanted a handout from me anyway, extra bucks for her voyage into the sky, which she couldn’t even afford.
I slept, I ate, I seeped into stoniness. It wasn’t so bad either. Frances ignored me. I didn’t care what she thought. I didn’t care about anything. My email had no more messages from Adinah—I was glad of that—but Becky wrote. Mom doesn’t even ask for anything and she’s saved all her money for this. What’s the matter with you? and I didn’t answer.
I might’ve walked around like that forever, not bothering with anything, but I stopped being good at it. I forgot one day when I walked onto a subway platform with Frances, and the ancient, loudmouth bum who hadn’t been there for a while was yelling, “Help the winos! Support your local wino! Remember the winos of New York!” This cracked me up, despite the many times I’d heard it before, and I saw that I missed being human. The bum said, “Hah, got a smile out of you,” a sentence I have always hated, and I didn’t even mind.
Okay, okay, I wrote to Adinah. Sorry for the delay.
Only Muslims are allowed to enter Mecca and Medina. Adinah had a paper from the imam of her mosque saying she was a real one, and a travel agent got her the visa. She’d never even had a passport before! And here she was, heading for Saudi Arabia, a pink-skinned middle-aged white lady who spoke nothing but English. She was training for the rigors, she said, by running a mile or so every day; dog-walking was good exercise but not that good. Becky reported her buying things to wear—a bunch of white cotton caftans and head scarves for the ritual walking, and a few blue ones (she always liked blue) for the rest of the time, since women had to be covered in public in Saudi Arabia. “She looks so weird in her abaya,” Becky said. “I can’t believe it’s Mom. Don’t tell her I said that.”
She was studying the prayers. Adinah said to me, “I’m so excited I can’t stand it.”
Hadn’t she had other excitements? What about the time we cracked the headboard during delirious, athletic sex? What about when Becky was born and Adinah couldn’t get over her really, really being our own girl? What about the day she thought I was dead in the World Trade Center and then I wasn’t?
Frances said, “It’s the whole city of God versus the city of man thing.”
The what?
“Oh, you know. Saint Augustine thought history was a running battle between the two. Heavenly beauty of purpose versus earthly preoccupations. Guess which was going to win in the end?”
“You’d think a person could live in both,” I said.
“Augie didn’t think so,” she said.
Frances knew quite a bit about saints, if you got her going, though she wasn’t a believer. She was temperamentally like me, nose to the grindstone of the here-and-now. How sensible we were, compared to that nut job Adinah.
And Becky, who had a perfectly good job assisting the editor of a knitting magazine, was going to take a two-week leave from it so she could walk one pack of dogs after another up and down the steep hills of San Francisco. Her mother (who hardly had a dime to her name) had to leave for the hajj free of debts and with her financial responsibilities covered. So her devoted daughter had to pick up dog poop while Adinah in her white robes glided off into the desert? Was that the way of it?
It was. I might have bought a ticket to California and just walked the dogs myself—I liked dogs, actually, and when I was a kid, my father was always going to get me one—or I might have paid someone to take Becky’s place—I could handle the amount, whatever it was, and wouldn’t that be financially handsome of me? I thought about both these things. Frances would’ve been horrified if I’d done either of them, but that wasn’t what stopped me. What stopped me was that it wasn’t like me. Skipping out on my job to lurch through the streets with a leash of panting mutts, mailing a large, unasked-for check to a woman I hadn’t slept with for more than two decades: not what I did.
I vowed that I would phone Becky often, to make sure she was okay and to get any news of Adinah. But I was in the middle of shooting a series about security guards in city schools, and I lost track of when the whole Mecca thing was, until I noticed stuff on the video monitors at work. Al Jazeera was broadcasting in English. “That’s my wife!” I said.
The whole room turned around to look at me. What we were watching, viewed from above, was a speckled mass, flecked white and gray, that was actually a sea of people, circling and pulsating around the giant black cube that was the Kaaba, the sacred site within the mosque. The spots of dark and light kept changing as the sea that was people kept moving, slow as a dream, stately, terrifying, constant.
My coworkers watching the monitor kept looking back at me to see if I was a Muslim and they’d never noticed. “She’s not really my wife,” I said.
They were ready to make wisecracks but I had scared them. I was busy thinking, Let her be okay. I had to wonder then who I was asking. The TV cut to an outside shot of the mosque, domes and minarets of gleaming pale stone, with more fields of humans pouring in. I stayed to watch, I had a horse in this race.
It occurred to me that the people winding around the Kaaba at the moment were really quite ordinary people. No better than I was, probably. But right now they were better. On TV a cheerful Punjabi pilgrim was showing the two pieces of regulation white cloth all the men wore—and what a pain it was to keep the top piece wrapped over your shoulder so you weren’t bare-chested. I would certainly look like a total idiot in that getup. I realized I was imagining myself in it.
In what life could I have ended up as a pilgrim? When could I have been someone who walked all that far, miles and miles, to visit innocence in the form of a place? Alongside me now by the video monitor the guys at work were yukking it up about the pilgrims’ white cloths. Easy to clean but not good for the office. I had the oddest feeling then—I was entirely glad that I’d known Adinah. As if I could wave to her from my side of the TV screen, Hi, girl. As if we were parts of the same body, as married couples dream of being, one shadow of us in the desert, another shadow in the newsroom. It was a very airy idea I had—and not one I could hold on to very long—but I kept it with me while I went about my business, while I did the job I knew how to do, I kept it all day and it was mine.
Buying and Selling
It still could startle Rudy, after all this time, to think how much of his working life involved courting the favor of rich people, coaxing them to donate a little bit of what they had plenty of. Who could begin to guess how many, many things depended on some rich fuck being generous? Hospitals! Orchestras! Universities! Homes for the homeless, food for the hungry. Rehab for rape victims, help for the lepers of India. Small wonder the deep pockets of the world couldn’t keep from complaining that some moocher always had a hand out.
Rudy worked for one of those hands—he worked for the lepers, in fact—and he had never meant to do such a thing. How had it happened? He’d been a New York club kid as a teenager, a serious fan of high-noise music who hung out in dives with ever-changing deejays all over the five boroughs. He’d lurched through his years at Columbia, barely getting up for classes but demonically intent when writing papers. And then he’d had the entirely insane idea to go into investment banking. Lots of aimless youth were doing that then. He was hired because people generally liked him, and he was put to work computer-crunching, culling data for analysis. After he’d spent a year turning into a gloomy creep with a good salary, one of the senior bankers took him to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, and he was so happy roaming the streets in the evenings—night markets! mosques! the once-tallest building in the world!—that he decided he could quit and travel dirt-cheap if he wanted, who would stop him?
The thing about India was that people did not ever, ever leave you alone. Not just the poor women holding their babies out, the begging toddlers pointing to their mouths, the old men without shoes or shirts or much flesh on their bodies, whom he could hardly blame for wanting to shake him down for what they could, and not just the hustlers of DVDs or instant tailoring or very-nice-girls or bargain rubies, who had to make a living. But also the schoolboys who entertained themselves imitating him to each other, the brightly bossy ones who couldn’t let him read a map without telling him what he really had to see.
As a New Yorker, Rudy was already a little too used to being hard-hearted, which at least made him unafraid of misery. He did give change if he thought he could avoid being swarmed. But every day, just when he thought he understood the place, he was duped or refuted or told silly lies. How did people live here? He decided that religion—apparent everywhere, in the ornate and amazing temples, in the marks of vermilion or ash or sandalwood paste on people’s faces—was the really interesting thing in India. On the advice of a couple at his hostel, he took a long, hot bus ride out of Mumbai to the city of Nasik, where the sacred Godavari River flowed. He arrived in the hottest part of the day, and he saw right away his mistake about religion here—not peaceful at all! not quiet! The closer he got to the river, the more the roadways swarmed with visitors, with wandering sadhus with painted faces and chests, with the wrecked and injured and alarming. At the river, women beat bright silk laundry against the rocks, boys goofed around in rented rowboats, and pilgrims waded into the stream. Sellers of bracelets, fried foods, incense, and postcards of Hindu gods leaped forward at the sight of Rudy.
He was making his way from this scene, up a narrow path on the bank, when a beggar with a bowl on a chain around his neck stopped him. The man, whose face looked strangely dried, with patches of lighter skin across the cheeks and neck, held out his curled hands, to show that some fingers were rounded nubs, missing the bits past the knuckle. Oh, God, he’s a leper, Rudy thought. Is that what he is? When he got out his wallet—he was wildly relieved he had a small bill on him, not too big to give—the man gazed in rheum-eyed thanks.
At the time, Rudy only wanted to get out of Nasik as soon as he could. He left the next day for Pune, where he took up with a pretty and fearless Englishwoman, who led them to the beaches of Goa, where he stayed for a month. But Nasik marked the beginning of chewing over a problem. He knew he wasn’t equal to doing anything very pure. On the other hand, there were lepers.
He certainly had not expected to stay in India; he didn’t even like it. But in Chennai he met this sweet, hilarious girl (Berry, a redhead from Miami), who was volunteering in a school for street kids, and she enlisted him in getting the boys to run off some of their energy in the tiny yard. This was not so hard, once he got his iPod hooked up with speakers and blasted some music for them to move to. He gave them his favorite tunes and he downloaded some Tamil pop and Bollywood numbers in Hindi. The boys had their own moves (signs of the ancient roots of hip-hop) and worked up some giddy routines.
It was no big deal to video it and put it on the school’s website. Rudy was home, back in New York, by the time it got posted—Berry wrote and said everyone noticed that donations were doubling and tripling, millions of rupees were pouring in. She was kidding, but he half believed her because it was so cool.
Back in New York (what an expensive city), he fudged a little on a job application and cited his fund-raising experience in Chennai. And so it went; he was hired by an excellent liberal arts college (his druggiest friend had gone there) to join the development staff. He turned out to be so good at inspiring donors to cough up cash that he then made a lateral move to a bigger college. And now, a decade after he’d gotten into it, he’d taken an absurd pay cut to be the director of understaffed Development for Hansen’s Hope, a network of care centers and residences and schools in South Asia for people with Hansen’s disease, aka leprosy.
“And it’s not that contagious,” he always had to say. Hope was in the name so people didn’t shriek and toss the appeals away at once. You had to emphasize the need but not disgust or horrify anyone, always a fine line. There had been a cure for more than two decades, for Christ’s sake. Rudy selected photos with interesting faces, not just ravaged figures, for the newsletter, which he mostly wrote. He was new at this, and it was much more of a challenge than getting college alums to send checks to their dear old distinguished schools. You’d think people would want to rain gold on the truly afflicted, but no, pas du tout.
HH had been started forty-odd years before by a rich kid back from the Peace Corps, and the board was still mostly friends of his family. Not young, but boards weren’t. Rudy got along best with the women and wives—well, that was his nature—and Deedee, one of his favorites, had brought a friend, a new “prospect,” to this year’s garden party gala in Central Park. Donor prospects were few and far between these days. Quite a handsome woman still, with dark hair pulled back in a bun, pale skin, red lips, the beaded silk suit a little dressy for a garden party. But she was French, they were a dressy people.
So now Rudy was trying to talk her up, without, of course, seeming to do more than bring her a mini-samosa and some punch. Was she from Paris? He had been to Paris. What a city.
She sort of laughed at him. “You will say to me about the croissants you ate. Maybe I like New York better. Do you think I am a traitor?”
Not answering that one. “What do you like about us?” he said.
“People are not acting superior, maybe they think they are but they don’t say it.”
“But we’re not as good-looking as the French,” he said.
She gave him a knowing smile. “If I say we have beautiful genes,” she said, “I will be acting superior.”
Liliane could not remember why she’d agreed to come to this garden party with Deedee. It was true she’d always liked parties, but less and less these days. She hoped she was past the need to parade herself (who wants to be a ridiculous seventy-one-year-old?) and the effort it took to enter conversations around her in English kept making her think, Why am I listening to some idiot who knows less than I do?
If you saw through everything, it made it hard to figure out what to do with yourself. This was the dilemma Liliane faced on a daily basis. It wasn’t much of a real problem, she knew, compared, for instance, to the constituency served by Hansen’s Hope. But it drove her to do things she didn’t expect, spend money she didn’t have. She had known herself better when she was young.
Her son, Emile, always told her how cynical she was. She was never cynical about him, but he knew her opinions on everything else. They were close, in their sometimes combative way. He was in his forties now and lived in the countryside in Limousin. When they Skyped, his ruddy bearded face on the computer was always startling, always dear.
He hadn’t had the best childhood either. She’d had him on her own—the pregnancy was an oversight she ignored too long—and it was before the government made such a big point of helping you. She got by on a part-time job guiding English-speaking tourists (bad pay) and on the occasional generosity of boyfriends. Her girlfriends served as babysitters and were highly unreliable. The early years were filled with screaming desperation, and her son remembered some of it. It was her very good luck that when Emile was twelve, she took up with the sheikh. He was not a sheikh at all—that was their own nickname for him, since his family was from Morocco and his name happened to be Ahmed. He’d been born in Paris, in fact, and he owned a nightclub on the edge of Montmartre, which was where Liliane met him. He hired all kinds of musicians, happier with newness than most people are, and it was a cozy, lively spot, moving in and out of pr
osperity as trends swirled around it. He and Liliane never married (why get into religious tangles?), but they lived together without undue strife for many years. They lived in Liliane’s cluttered apartment, and he was out working much of the time, waiting for beverage deliveries or meeting promoters in cafés. She was under the impression that quite a lot of his profits went to his mother, he was the only son, but when Liliane complained of this, they had their one bitter quarrel, and she kept her outrage down after that. Mostly he was a sweet-tempered man, playful, expansive, genuinely clever, good with Emile. He brought her quite beautiful presents—he was a sucker for anything with a lily in its design—and he kept up his admiring patter, his droll, flirtatious praise, in the same rhythms for two decades.
The club had a big resurgence in the nineties—all of a sudden half of Paris wanted to hear some Algerian raï group that had been playing there for years—and lines clogged the street outside. Ahmed, in a display of enterprise she’d hardly seen before, opened another club a few blocks away, which was also packed. Maybe a third club? What a busy, lit-up ringmaster he turned into—in those years he was an overwrought and entirely happy man. They were both in their fifties by then, and Liliane managed to at least get a better wardrobe out of all his hunches paying off. A black cashmere coat with raglan sleeves, a short red dress by a great designer that looked wonderful on her. She still had them.
He was only sixty when he died, cracking his handsome, beloved head when he fell off a ladder he’d mounted to check out a faulty spotlight. Liliane wailed like an animal when they told her. She could not swallow the impossible stupidity of the accident—he was not a man who should’ve died at that age. Quick and strong, free of the bad habits of most club owners, tuned to the pleasures of this earth.