Native Believer

by Ali Eteraz

  In the film Adjani plays the second daughter of the novelist Victor Hugo. She spends her life chasing an indifferent British man around the world, subsumed in her love for him, destroyed in the end by the inability to attain him. The story wasn’t what was compelling. Most of the magic of the film lay in Adjani. She really did look like Rasha Florence Quinn. Not identical twins by any means, but similar enough to be long-lost sisters.

  My initial impulse was to hide the film, because if Marie-Anne were to see it she would probably suffer another bout of sadness.

  The trouble was that I had underestimated my own reaction to Adjani. She struck me as immaculate. I found myself obsessed with Adjani’s mouth. The way it curved downward at the edges, with that perfect lower lip like the hull of a prophetic ark or the arc of a perfect plot. Her eyes were compulsive. Peals of pain running across her pupils. A thorn jammed inside an iris. A knot in the cornea that couldn’t be cut. Her body was like a tree, progressively twisted and gnarled by the gravity of her love. Adjani started stalking me, stealing upon me when I was sleeping, an uncontrollable apparition. Beauty. Every time she prodded my conscience I wanted to draw out the film and watch it again. That’s precisely what I ended up doing. I tucked the film underneath the cushions of the sofa and proceeded to watch it whenever I was eating. The only time I withheld watching was if Marie-Anne was at home. There was no need to subject her to her mother’s doppelgänger.

  Seeing Adjani on repeat aroused in me all the dormant thoughts of Mrs. Quinn. I thought about the first time I had seen her. It hadn’t been at the steakhouse in Buckhead, but a few months earlier, at our graduation at Emory. Marie-Anne and I had agreed that graduation wasn’t the right time to tell our parents about each other. I had been with my parents and Marie-Anne had been with hers, just a few yards away, sharing a close embrace with her mother, who was wearing a printed sundress with a parasol hat in purple and had a champagne flute in her left hand. While Marie-Anne had been holding her mother close she had peered over a shoulder, given me a wink, and pointed to her mother’s back and mouthed the words My mom! in my direction. Then she had planted a big soft kiss on her mother’s shoulder and given me a thumbs-up. There had been something vulnerable in Marie-Anne’s need to make sure that she was linked to her mother at a moment like that. I had gone away from graduation equating Mrs. Quinn with the ability to unlock the deeper levels of my then-girlfriend’s vulnerability, and with a separate wish; namely, to one day be close enough to Marie-Anne that she would want her mother to experience affection from me as well. Obviously that moment had never materialized. The next time I saw Mrs. Quinn had been at the announcement of our engagement. From then on she’d been nothing but a conniver and enemy against me. Against us.

  The revival of the memory was upsetting. What kind of woman was Rasha Florence Quinn that she couldn’t see how much Marie-Anne felt for her? How could she undermine her daughter’s matrimonial decision? The only rational explanation was that Mrs. Quinn knew exactly how much clout she had with her daughter, that she was fully aware how weak Marie-Anne was in front of her, and she simply felt no remorse in taking advantage of it. Until now I had never let myself dislike Mrs. Quinn, believing that if I let rancor toward her settle into my spirit, then Marie-Anne would somehow manage to see it and be hurt by my judgment. But something about conceiving of Mrs. Quinn as Adjani, observing her from a third-person perspective, made it easier to let my resentment turn belligerent. I could conceive of her in all sorts of unflattering ways and not feel like I was insulting Marie-Anne. I could let myself imagine violating her, slapping her, for the punishment she had inflicted on my wife. You are a petty, petty woman, I wanted to get on top of her and scream. You have no idea how much suffering you’ve inflicted.

  The next time I watched L’Histoire d’ Adèle H., I paused it during an inappropriate scene. Then, aghast by what I had done, I hid the film underneath the sofa cushion.

  * * *

  One morning Richard Konigsberg surprised me at the apartment. He arrived at the building and buzzed on the aged speakerphone. It squawked like a duck with rusted vocal cords. Richard pressed the button over and over again. I knew what he was doing. He was making sure I was irritated. He said he enjoyed making people turn acid like vinegar, because vinegar was how you cleaned the urine and fecal matter of the world.

  I met him in the lobby. He was not his usual self, looking listless and distant. His face was there but the eyes seemed reeled back into the head. His physique had lost much of its authority. The lines of his body and the void that surrounded him now all ran into one another, as if he had been left unfinished by some attention-deficient painter.

  “Did a gold digger clean you out?”

  “No, the Big Nonexistent did.” He jerked his thumb upward.

  His declaration came at around the same time a pair of toddlers across the lobby ran to the grand piano. They bashed their heads upon the lower octave.

  I took Richard by the elbow and led him to the café attached to the building. I sat on the inside so he was facing the window. He made me switch seats.

  “Twenty years old,” he sighed into his latte. “In the military. Got blown up in Afghanistan.”

  “Who?”

  “My son,” he croaked.

  “Your son? I didn’t know you had a son.”

  I stared at him with a lump in my throat, the force of his announcement pounding through my body. We had never been men who dealt with the unexpected. Everything we did in life was the consequence of careful planning. Yet here we were, over the period of a few months, coming to each other slammed by the unpredictable.

  Richard tried to keep his lips together, but they insisted on ripping their sutures. He choked a little. “I didn’t either. I slept with this stripper in Chicago. She knew the whole time I was the father. But she didn’t want to be connected to a Jew. Can you believe that? The kid was broke, so instead of college he became the few, the proud, the dead. Here I was. With all this money. He could have had it all.”

  Richard’s face collapsed upon the bones. He was a bighearted man, gregarious and caring, who had been destined to go out as a shooting star, or in some orgiastic storm. But that was not what would happen now. He would shrivel up and become silent and find that when he tried to flick his eyes toward a fine female, his eyelids and his pupils simply wouldn’t react. Here and there around Philly there were losers from Atlantic City who went and drowned everything in one fell weekend, and came back and sat in Love Park, or on the stone benches at Eakins Oval, and just rocked back and forth, without an identity, without money, the only papyrus in their possession the four-chambered one in their chest. That was what would happen to my friend.

  “I’m speechless,” I said. “What now?”

  Richard’s weakness spread like spiders on the web of his wrinkles. “I’m leaving for Israel,” he said at last. It was the only firm thing he had spoken.

  “What’s in Israel?”

  “What’s in America?”

  I felt insignificant; not only because I couldn’t be of any use to him, but because my years of doting on him hadn’t led him to think of me as a son. He was leaving everything behind without considering the possibility that I could fill the void.

  I sat silent, desperate to find a way to rip off the wet sponge affixed to my skull. The jolt that Plutus had given me was a gentle stab compared to the waterboarding Richard received. I saw him seated before me, hemmed in by the limitations imposed by family and community. He seemed unsuited to the moment, like he was an aristocrat in a prison. The reason he had avoided a wife and family his entire life was precisely because he knew that they would cause him to give up his universality, his social breadth, and become a narrow man. That was why he had never considered moving to Israel, despite many of his acquaintances having left for Tel Aviv. “Israel is a narrow little place,” he used to say, referring not to the geography, but to the feeling of being hemmed in by his people. He had always been scared of being crushed b
y the weight of a “We.” All his life he had struggled to be the autonomous “I,” and that was why he had thrived in America, which was an ideal place for those who could subsist alone. But now, upon finding that all this time America had been playing him, that he had been the victim of a twenty-year-long hate crime, one that concluded with the death of a son he never knew in a war that he had never paid attention to, it wasn’t a surprise that Richard was going to the place where he could lose himself in homogeneity, in the inexorability of an eternal race, under the asphalt blanket that others in his tribe had hung for them to take shelter under. Was this why Zionism had been created? To give an aggrieved Jew like Richard a place to go and wail?

  “You need to sue Plutus for discrimination,” he said suddenly, as if remembering that our relationship was built around him imparting wisdom to me. Any other arrangement was not consistent with who we were. “You aren’t the only American Muslim confronting nonsense like this.”

  I didn’t have the energy to fight him. How was I to explain that I was an apatheist, indifferentist, materialist. The closest I had ever come to letting someone define me by an origin other than America was when I told some people I was West Asian, which covered anything from the Red Sea to the Himalayas, everything from Israeli to Iranian to Indian.

  “I don’t like your terminology,” I replied.

  “Sometimes you just have to become what people want you to be and then become a better version of that to get your revenge,” he said.

  “How did that work out for you? Could you erase the hatred they have poured into ‘Jew’? Wouldn’t it have been better if you had hidden your origin in something, like I am trying?” I thought about Chagall. When things were safe it was no big deal to believe that you ought to express your heritage. It was only when you got accused that you regretted giving up your hidey-hole.

  We sat and murmured at each other. I expressed more condolence about his son; he told me not to overthink it. To change topics up a little, he told me about his exit plan. He had liquidated his shares, turned over management of a firm to a partner, and moved out of his apartment. He was on his way to hand his car over to the new owner and had stopped to give me a backup key to a storage room he’d rented over in Cherry Hill. I was struck neither by the finality nor the alacrity of it all. Richard was different from me. When he had a grievance he found a solution to it, rather than the gray abeyance that I languished in.

  I tucked Richard’s key into my pocket and walked him to his car. He had gotten a ticket for running over the meter by five minutes. The blue and white citation was tucked under the windshield wiper, slapped by the breeze. “Let me cover that,” I reached forward.

  He hit my hand and pulled me into a hug. “Don’t save me,” he said, “if you won’t save yourself.”

  I was comatose in his arms. How similar Richard and I were. Both of us without children. We would have made terrible pioneers, terrible settlers. In the self-replicating mechanism of America we were aberrations and anomalies. Eunuchs unable to bring princes forward. Condemned to prop up people who did not owe us and we didn’t own.

  A couple of uncles who couldn’t spawn.

  * * *

  That night Marie-Anne and I went to Rembrandt’s for dinner, where we shared a shank of lamb and played a game of trivia. Afterward we walked along 22nd Street, along the massive walls of the Eastern State Penitentiary. The snow was piled in giant oily black mounds along the curbs. Marie-Anne had her hair up and wore a cardigan with a long skirt. I was in a tan corduroy jacket with elbow pads.

  She had been a little reluctant when out of nowhere I proposed going out on a date. But I hadn’t been willing to let her wiggle out. With Richard’s departure Marie-Anne had acquired even greater import in my life, and I wanted to make sure things were shored up between us.

  “I talked to Richard today.”

  “How is he? Dirty old man . . .”

  “Was he ever dirty toward you?”

  “Why are you talking in the past tense?”

  “He left. For Israel.”

  “For. Ever?”

  “Yeah. What do you think about that?”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said. “He wasn’t happy here.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Just, you know.” She cleared her throat, sliding her ballet flat over a spot of ice. “He was always so active. So unsettled.”

  “Something wrong with that?”

  “Nothing wrong with it,” she said. “Just shows a kind of unhappiness.”

  “Maybe he was unhappy.”

  “He had everything. Yet even then he was always taking up some cause. Maybe if he wasn’t suing everyone all the time he would be more settled. Act his age.”

  I was antagonized on his behalf. In Richard’s willingness to eschew a settled life for one where he pursued giant class-actions against companies that defrauded their investors, I had always seen a sort of grizzled Robin Hood. Instead of arrows he launched complaints. Instead of sheriffs he annoyed CEOs. Maybe all of it had been a fruitless endeavor on his part; but it showed a willingness to align himself with those who lacked something.

  One by one the houses around us turned down the lights. I decided not to tell Marie-Anne any more about Richard. I had thought that by telling her I would be able to cry out a little sorrow. But she didn’t understand why Richard mattered. Men like him were rare. Today’s man either pursued outright domination or opted for complete submission. Few offered their own slaughter in the game of bluff that produced justice. Marie-Anne had little sympathy for anyone who took risks on behalf of strangers and unknowns.

  After dinner we went to Bishop’s Collar. The bar was empty and quiet. We ordered a pint. Marie-Anne said she remembered something for work and needed to write down a note. She picked up a napkin and sent me off to find a pen. I made my way over to a new bartender, a bald, bearded fellow with tattoos of dragons and griffins. There was a pen in his front pocket, one of those where you could click five different colors. “Can we borrow that for a second?” I gestured in Marie-Anne’s direction with my head.

  “Yeah, sure, buddy,” he said and handed it over. Then he grasped my wrist rather firmly and looked into my eyes. “Just make sure your mom returns it before leaving. First day at my job and I already lost my other pen.”

  “My mom?” I glanced back at Marie-Anne. “You think that woman is my mother? How could someone who looks like me come from someone who looks like her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Your daddy was black?”

  “You nailed it,” I said and returned to Marie-Anne.

  She smiled. “What did that guy say?”

  “Nothing. Just that we should feel comfortable keeping the pen.”

  “How nice of him.” She raised a thumbs-up in the direction of the bar and proceeded writing.

  Her note had something to do with the wording for a pitch she had been playing around with. “All these technical words like unmanned aerial vehicles sound so terrible during a presentation,” she said. “I want to come up with something better to use when I’m just sitting with someone. Any ideas?”

  “How about birds?”

  “Birds?”

  “Yeah. Just birds. That’s all flying things are, right?”

  “That’s good,” she said absentmindedly, as if she’d forgotten she’d asked for my input. “But I need something a little more descriptive.”

  We drank another round and headed home. The bartender tried to glare at me on the way out, but Marie-Anne positioned herself in between me and him. At our apartment building I noticed a new security guard stepping behind the front desk. She wore the uniform of the new owners of the building. Her arrival reminded me of Marlon’s absence. But what would I have gained with his presence?

  Once upstairs, I went to the kitchen. Marie-Anne was still thinking about work and went to the living room and put on the news. She was following the conversation about protests in a far-off West Asian country. Throug
h the kitchen doorway I stared at her, absorbed.

  I stood on one foot, the other raised and scraping the rough surface of the fridge. “I want children,” I declared.

  Marie-Anne turned to me, pulling her red hair back in a ponytail. “You know I can’t, baby,” she said. “It’s too risky.”

  “We can manage the risks. Medicine today . . .”

  “I am rotten,” she said. “I don’t want to pass this rot to our kids.”

  “What you have isn’t genetic. It won’t be passed on.”

  “I don’t want to make them.”

  A flame passed over my body. It wasn’t some misogynist insurrection caused by the way Marie-Anne made herself master over my virility. I, along with an entire generation of men, had ceded that sort of authority a long time ago. My rage had another locus, namely myself. Marie-Anne had become spooked about children only after her own relationship with her mother broke down, and the reason for the breakdown was me. Had I been less effete, less frail, more tangible, more of a presence, Marie-Anne would’ve never had to suffer her familial gulf, and without that trauma she would be busy reproducing, tightening her relationship with her tribe by expanding it, weaving herself into it in the manner matriarchs did. In that wave I would’ve been swept along as well. From her matriarchy my patriarchy would have arisen.

  “But I really want to . . .”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to feel like a part of the land. This land. For. Ever.”

  She looked at me like I’d thrown pie at her or smeared her face with cake. “You don’t need children for that. I can get you a flag pin.”

  “You don’t understand . . .” I synthesized a syllogism about roots, and putting them down, and children, and a clan, and creating a colony, and being an American patriarch from whom many generations emerged; not an average man, but a stud, like the sort Secretariat was, or his father, Bold Ruler, who was sired by a champion called Nasrullah. Something about bloodlines. But nothing like that came out. Nothing came out at all.