Fools

by Joan Silber

  His friends—perfectly nice men she’d known for years—said that she really should not go to the funeral, women didn’t go to the ceremony. She stayed back in his sister’s house (his mother was long gone), helping the women in the family prepare for the visitors who came after. She was too stricken to be indignant, though later at home she heard herself mutter a few completely idiotic anti-Muslim things to Emile, who said, “Oh, stop. You can, I know.” Ahmed had liked his mosque (when he bothered to go), it had great Sufi chanting and singing, but Liliane was raging at everything in those days.

  And what was she going to do? The clubs could not go on without Ahmed. She would get by, she always did, but how? Musicians were planning a memorial concert to honor him, and there was talk of raising some money for her as part of this. Before it could happen, a lawyer called her about the will. Ahmed had apparently been putting his profits (what profits?) into real estate. He had left nice sums to his sisters, but there were two buildings in Belleville and a good-sized lot near Orly that were now hers and worth more euros than she could guess. It was the great shock of her life—she was more stunned than if he had been unfaithful for years. He had tricked her, outsmarted her behind her back. Probably he hadn’t wanted her to know about the money for fear she would spend it. Well, she would’ve wanted to. Had he thought he couldn’t resist her?

  It was not a comfortable mystery, and it was strange being joyous about the money just when she was beaten flat by the weight of constant despair. If death ate everything, could it possibly matter that money had come to her? To Liliane it could. At first she did nothing but cash the checks from the rents when an agent sent them. How illicit it felt, how underhanded the glee of the money seemed. As if she were a spy, impersonating Ahmed’s wife, when he didn’t have a wife. A well-paid spy.

  “I feel like an impostor,” she said to Emile.

  “Some people like that feeling,” Emile said. He was not such a person—this was why he lived in the country and sold cheeses for a living—but he was not an innocent.

  Liliane knew very little about managing property, but she learned what she could and she believed she had more sense than most people. In time she turned into the harder sort of boss (this did not surprise her), with an eye out for corruption, wily enough in hiring contractors, raising rents, firing the lazy, and sneaking around certain taxes. Later she sold the Orly piece at what turned out to be a very opportune time.

  None of this was what newspapers would call big money, but it was to Liliane, who came from a family of bricklayers. In France no one ever mistook her for well connected, and she was amused when she and Emile took a trip to Antibes, and some Americans at the hotel assumed her style was aristocratic. Emile thought it was because they heard him telling her how he missed the sheikh. Liliane ended up befriending one of the Americans anyway, a tiny, hearty woman who told funny stories at breakfast, and they all went together to hear jazz outside at night. Deedee, the woman, had decent taste in music.

  And Liliane was very glad she had Deedee to spend some days with, in this month of vacation she was giving herself in New York. They got along very well, despite Deedee’s immensely comical notion that Liliane was a woman who went to balls and benefits. “No one has money anymore,” Deedee could say, and she meant people had two hundred million instead of three hundred. Something like that.

  Liliane herself had lost quite a bit in the “crise”—it wasn’t such a good time to be in real estate after all. Her attempts to recoup had been especially disastrous. She’d come here (she’d always liked Americans) as a very necessary break from the vice of buying and selling and putting her money in the wrong places. The last months had shaken her confidence. She was thinking about more travel now, on the theory she might as well spend it before it disappeared on its own. Emile wouldn’t care what he was left. Or did everyone always care?

  This party for Deedee’s charity was in a very beautiful garden, an enclave of formal greenery near 105th Street, quite unlike the rest of New York. Worth seeing, certainly. It had allées of fruit trees and grassy terraces and a fountain of dancing bronze maidens. The boy was saying, “People get married here, although I wouldn’t say it was a really sexy garden.”

  “Who is saying that a wedding must have to be sexy?” Liliane said.

  “I’ve never been married myself. I bow to your greater knowledge,” he said.

  Liliane gave him a look. The boy had a good head, squarish and somehow graceful, with brownish hair gelled back from his forehead.

  “I was married in a mosque,” she said.

  Generally, people switched the subject when you mentioned mosques. He asked if he could get her more punch, another tidbit?

  Deedee came by when she was alone. “We did well, I’m very happy,” she said. “Look how many people. For a great cause.”

  A woman behind them wore a lovely, broad-brimmed straw hat, trimmed with whimsical flowers. She certainly didn’t look as if she were thinking about lepers, but why should she be? Weren’t her dollars worth more than thoughts? Liliane was of that opinion, although she hadn’t always been.

  The boy was back with an Indian sweetmeat, a delicious lump of what he said was chickpea flour and sugar and clarified butter. “I totally stuffed myself on these when I was living in India,” he said.

  “Did you like it there?” she asked.

  “No and yes. It’s mind-boggling. You have to keep five hundred contradictions in your head at once to even pay attention there.”

  Liliane was starting to like him better.

  “Don’t even ask how many calories these have,” Deedee said. “But you don’t have to worry.”

  “She certainly doesn’t,” Rudy said. “It’s a French secret, isn’t it? I think they are a superior race.”

  Rudy lingered with his assistant, Veena, after the guests were gone and the caterers were folding up the chairs. “Success!” she said. “Good turnout.”

  “These things cost too much money,” he said. “Low profit. We’re not a big outfit.”

  “Oh, we’re always in a squeeze. What else is new?”

  “Yes,” Rudy said. “Mighty me. I’ll carry us all.”

  His oldest friends would’ve laughed themselves silly at his carrying anyone anywhere. They thought he was a doofus in a suit, a slacker who’d managed to disguise himself as employed. Little did they know he was a professional. Who wants to be conned by a sharpie? No, the modest young fellow is the one you want to write a check to. That was what disarming meant: didn’t know what hit you.

  He used to bring his girlfriends to galas, and they had liked dressing up and getting the glamour of it. He was just as glad he was single at the moment. Liliane was going to require undistracted attention. She was arch and wary (how had she captured the sheikh?), an unlikely pal for Deedee, and he didn’t have long to cultivate her.

  His boss, Mary the Figurehead, was now stepping across the grass to literally pat him on the head. She was a bulky, mild-voiced woman in beige linen. “Well done,” she said.

  “Oh, you say that to all the boys,” Rudy said. It was never a mistake to flirt just slightly with her. She was chief executive, though most of the decisions were made on the ground without her, in India and Bangladesh.

  “I’m always so glad you’re with us,” she said, which was bullshit, it was just the way she talked.

  HH was not in good shape, in truth. In South Asia, the rainy season was just starting again. Last year’s flooding rains had washed out no less than four of the organization’s centers, and the rebuilding wasn’t anywhere near finished on three of them. His email was full of pleas from the managers, piles of painful details, as if he were the one to persuade. Please do not forget us, they liked to say.

  One of Rudy’s girlfriends had referred to what he did as “a high-stress job,” and he’d ditched her after that. Dear managers, your pesky suffering is so stressing me out. Right. All the same, he was probably drinking more since he’d been doing this. And a few other
things.

  When he left the gala, he walked across the park (how beautiful the last mellow daylight was, he loved his city) to get the Brooklyn-bound subway to his apartment in Fort Greene. There he collapsed on his sofa in front of the news, and when he woke up what felt like many years later, his cell phone said 11:03 p.m., an hour at which there was nothing to do but get up and splash water on his face and go out into the night.

  At a bar a few blocks away, he swilled down beer and listened to an okay but not thrilling neo-punk group that blasted out monotonous chants and then broke into a pretty close imitation of the Sex Pistols (he had loved them when he was ten) screeching how they wanted to destroy the passerby ’cause they wanted to be anarchy. Surely this wasn’t all that was left of the anarchists of the world. This fabulous shrieking. Had anybody occupying Wall Street remembered to sing those songs? He hoped so. Rudy could see why revolution was no longer a faith, but the results of that were not all good, as the Occupiers had pointed out quite eloquently. He sort of hated rich people himself, and he probably saw the best of them.

  He left when the band did a loud and louder brain-blitz that didn’t feel like pleasure. He was getting too old for this shit. But it was too early to go to bed, and he walked a few blocks to a club that booked untrendy jazz and oddball blues, old-timers and upstarts, a place almost ruined when the Times ran a feature on it. So it was mobbed with assholes now, so what? Assholes had a right to like music.

  When he walked inside, it was indeed packed. He liked the mixed audience—a Latino kid with an eentsy beard and a hooded sweatshirt next to a dame from a different neighborhood in pearls (pearls!) and satin slacks. A piano player who looked six years older than God was doing great things with “I’m a King Bee.”

  At the end of the set, people shuffled around, and Rudy got a good seat at the bar. At a table near him two older women were cracking each other up as they ordered drinks. One of them could not seem to pronounce, “One more Rob Roy on the rocks,” and he saw (could this be right?) that her friend in pearls, laughing away, was Liliane. How had she gotten here? Was this place in guidebooks now, drawing Euro-trash? “Hello, hello,” he called across to her.

  It took her a second to get who he was. “Oh, my friend from the garden,” she said.

  “How nice to see you again,” he said. ”How very, very nice.”

  Liliane had been having an excellent time. She was with a truly old friend, an American whom she had known in her twenties. Barbara had spent a year in Paris as a college student, and for this trip had been miraculously located again through email by Emile, smart boy that he was. In their youth the two women had spent many vivid evenings picking up men together. Barbara remembered quite a few details that Liliane had mercifully forgotten. The current Barbara was stringier and paler—Liliane would not have known her—but as the evening went on, her younger face began to surface. She had kept something of her looks, in a messy, New York way.

  They were not as drunk as they were acting, but they were not sober either. Why should they be? Barbara’s husband had gone home to sleep, and Liliane kept thinking she saw an ex-lover at one of the tables, an American clarinet player she’d once stolen some cash from. It was never him, and she wasn’t even picturing him at what would be his real age, but she kept thinking what she would say if it was. That money wasn’t doing you any good anyway. He’d been an alcoholic, he was probably dead by now. When last seen, he was playing his clarinet for spare change in the Métro.

  “Your friend got this round,” the bartender said. He meant the boy from the garden party.

  “Très gentil.” Liliane saluted him in thanks.

  Barbara introduced herself. “I knew Liliane when she was just a young babe.”

  “She’s still a babe,” Rudy said.

  “Oof,” Liliane said. “Enough of that.”

  The piano player had started again. He had a way of approaching the keyboard as if the motion of his own hands surprised him. He was really the best thing she’d seen in New York.

  “You love music, don’t you?” the boy turned and said. “I could tell by the way you walk.”

  She had to laugh. “I’m walking very much in your city.”

  “You have to let me show you some things. My New York.”

  “It’s better than anyone else’s New York?”

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  Oh, she would? She liked this boy, but his self-assurance could get annoying. She went back to looking at the piano player. How weary and quietly jaunty these tunes were. The man had found a good way to be old, she thought.

  “I’ll show you great neighborhoods,” the boy said. “And you can show me Paris sometime.”

  “She’s a good guide.” Barbara snickered.

  When the music was over, they all got up to leave. The boy went out to help them get a taxi, on the busier corner a block away. “You’re gleaming in the night,” he said to her. “Your satin.”

  “Let’s hope a cab sees it,” Barbara said.

  “You look like the moon,” he said. He reached out and flicked one of her dangling pearl earrings. His fingertip grazed her neck. What is he doing? she thought.

  And then he was waving wildly at a cab, which did pull over and stop. “Tell me the name of your hotel,” he said to her, very fast, “and I’ll call so we can make a time for our walk.” She wasn’t so glad to say the hotel’s name but she did. And then he swooped down on her for a kiss on the cheek. His bristled face smelled of sweat and the oils in male skin, and he whispered, “I look forward to seeing you,” as he held her in a hug that went on too long. She gave him an icy look when it was over, but he was shaking hands with Barbara by then. He told the cabdriver, “Take very good care of these ladies.”

  Liliane had never in her life been insulted by the fact of male attention. It had not always been welcome, but she had never held it against men that they were bothering her with their desire or admiration. That was the way of things, and it usually served her well. In the cab, with Barbara half asleep and the dark streets outside, she was affronted by that dramatic hug. If she were young, she would’ve just known he wanted to have sex with her (everyone did), but it was about money. He was trying to use her vanity for money.

  And she didn’t have that much money. The insult was for nothing. Was this how the Indian lepers were fed? When she got back to the hotel that night, she went to bed and dreamed that she was entirely naked and sitting on the gritty curb of a city street. She was trying to cover herself—she looked in the gutter for old plastic bags and wrappers, dirty pages of newspaper, and she held these scraps of garbage against her lap. And there were naked children, a whole row of them, settled in the street alongside her, foraging refuse the same way. The children called her “madame,” they were saying something to her, but then she woke up.

  She was under clean white sheets in her hotel in New York and the room was cold. Americans liked air-conditioning too much. There was no reason for her to be here. What did she want from this place? Recreation, diversion, escape. This rough, crude city, full of grasping morons: What had she been thinking?

  The next day, which was Sunday, Rudy felt the effects of last night’s alcohol, but he did remember that he had to call Deedee before he did anything else. She was a person who actually went to church, so he lingered over breakfast until noon, and then she answered her home phone. “I wanted to ask you about Liliane,” he said. “Donors always want things. You know, kinds of satisfaction. What would she want?”

  “You know what I worry about,” Deedee said. “If she’s a Muslim—which of course is perfectly fine—we fund all these centers for Hindus. You can see in the photos they have statues of gods with garlands of marigolds on them in the courtyards. She might not like that. Lot of violence between the groups in India.”

  Oh, please. Deedee was usually a little sharper than that.

  “Do you think she might want to dedicate something as a gift for her husband?” he said.

  “W
hat a lovely idea,” Deedee said. “I never thought of that. That’s how you do what you do, isn’t it? You can think of how people can do the right thing and please themselves too.”

  “Yes, well, there’s always a challenge in getting some romance into leprosy.”

  “I know there are romantic stories,” Deedee said. “You wrote them.”

  It was true that in the last newsletter Rudy had written a feature about Bamala and Pandi, two infected people in a center near Thanjavur. They had been engaged to each other as children in a village, but then the engagement was broken when Bamala became sick. Years later they met by chance at a Hansen’s Hope center when Pandi was very ill. He was now doing well on drugs, Bamala had grown older and stronger, and they were planning to marry.

  And how was Rudy going to work that into a conversation? And there were parts left out—damage, abandonment, trauma, ostracism. But he liked the story, and who didn’t like it when love triumphed? Rudy was not himself a fool for love. He had resisted Berry, in India, surely the woman he’d loved best, when she wanted him to settle with her for good. Why had he not leaped at that chance? Well, he hadn’t.

  He thought Liliane, who was not likely to get any other husbands at this stage, might go for the idea of a handsome memorial gesture, a Taj Mahal. It was, frankly, the only thing he could think of.

  Rudy had dealt with any number of widows. You had to tread very carefully, not to kick against any anguished regrets or buried anger. You had to keep remembrances abstract. No frankness. Once, at a funeral, he’d heard the dead person’s best friend say, “She was such a fucking prima donna.” This was said right in the eulogy, and the dead person had once been Rudy’s girlfriend, not too long before. It was Clara, the girl who’d told him what a high-stress job he had.

  How hard he had been on Clara, with her pop-psych sympathy for one well-fed white man’s office job. He’d told her she had no clue, and she’d said, “No one can talk to you, you’re such a snob, you think you’ve visited hell like Jesus.” But she had been weeping as she said it, he was more or less out the door. And a few months later she had died, from the mistake of walking into an unmarked elevator shaft, before she could learn anything.