by Ali Eteraz
It was Ali Ansari. He was dressed in his favorite coat, but instead of slacks he wore jeans folded up to show his ankles. He had added a beige skullcap and black plastic frames. An Islamic rosary was in his fist. His scruff had become a beard. His eyes had the rotating intensity of camera lenses. The ring he had dropped at the deli was on his left hand.
It all made sense. Ali’s abandonment of Talibang could have only occurred through Candace’s guidance. Her disappearance could have only taken place through his complicity. Their courtship must have been a conspiracy they carried out against me. Sheikh Shakil must have been the officiant at a wedding held at Masjid ud-Dukhan. The meeting at the deli must have been Ali’s way of getting me out of Candace’s life. She must have been the person who picked him up. In a way, it was all very inevitable. People like Ali Ansari and Candace always found each other, even if they were temporarily distracted by technocrats like myself.
I focused on Candace’s belly. She was just about the size that it was conceivable the pregnancy could have been my doing. I would have given anything to peer into the amniotic sac to find out if that was my progeny, conceived in this soil, to be born in this soil, to be raised as a future master of this soil.
Without thinking, I reached for Candace’s stomach. If only I could touch the womb, I might be able to sense the identity of the father. It would be like in the films, when the journeymen reach the orb and it lights up only for the rightful recipient of the magical power. My hands opened, my fingers throbbed, my eyes widened.
But I was not able to touch. Not even to get near. Ali Ansari got in my way. He punched me in the mouth and split my lip. I looked at him with my hand to my mouth, as if I would yank at his beard, snatch at his skullcap, break his rosary. But in the end I had to watch the two of them leave together, arms around each other’s waists, taking their family into their home.
* * *
Left alone in the street, I ran to the nearest gas station and stemmed my blood. There were no paper towels and I had to use my undershirt. I came out to Broad Street near the law school and hailed the first cab headed toward the art museum.
At home, having patched up my wound a little, I jumped on the Internet. I researched every method for how I could determine the identity of Candace’s baby. It didn’t take long to realize that all of the legal methods of determining the child’s paternity were closed. Once Ali and Candace got married, the law made a presumption that he was the child’s father. I read something about assertions and rebuttable presumptions by another party, but that seemed like the kind of bureaucratic mess that I couldn’t carry out without Marie-Anne’s knowledge. It was also likely to be very expensive. There were the personal methods, obviously, like going to the hospital when the child was born and somehow getting away with a piece of the child’s DNA. Or I could send an infiltrator. Maybe someone like Leila. The other possibility involved bribing someone to get into the medical records at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. There were darker options too, those involving intimidation or blackmail. Options that might prompt a direct confession. None of those were things I had much familiarity with.
With the permutations and schemes dying out from lack of possibility, I went over to the window and peered outside, toward North Philly. It mustered nothing more than a glow. No grandiose homes, no fountains spouting silver, no stepping-stones to the stars. Just fungal pools and unctuous hovels. Just stripped sedans and broken vacuum cleaners. A depression sloping toward an abyss. But to me it was a treasure chest. A jar of wine. A skein of water. A womb. I saw the indistinct face of an heir, an inheritor, a vice-regent fluttering somewhere past Girard College. Out of my grasp. Beyond my reach.
It was Ali Ansari who had taken that from me.
With a hard yank I shut the blinds. They jammed at an angle and sliced at my wrist.
Chapter Eleven
Marie-Anne returned three days later. My torn lip had healed. She came out of customs in a state of euphoria. The cause of joy was a commission check worth twenty thousand dollars delivered to her from MimirCo in Doha. It had wiped away the memory of the Al Jazeera fiasco. She put it in her palm and slid it toward the ceiling of the cab. It floated into my lap. The question of how we would use the money was foremost on her mind. She asked me what I thought about using for the down payment on the condo. On top of what she brought home, I had eight thousand saved up. I told her I was ready to make that call.
“We are really doing it, aren’t we?” she said. “Faster than we ever expected. I mean, wasn’t it just last year that we were worried what we were going to do after you lost your job?”
Marie-Anne’s cheerfulness increased as we arrived home. The guys from maintenance had come into the apartment while we’d been out. Marie-Anne had secretly purchased the cast-iron stove that I had coveted and gotten it installed while I’d been at the airport. We stood next to each other, staring at the stove’s reflective surface.
“I think we should have a party.”
“Shouldn’t we celebrate on our own?”
“We owe our success to a lot of people,” she replied. “We should take a moment to thank them.”
“Fine then,” I said. “But this time you do the preparations.”
Marie-Anne took to the hosting like she was planning a wedding. She created an online document and worked her way through the checklist. She had the ability to maintain sustained concentration even toward minutiae. I, on the other hand, required epic or grand aims in order to produce that kind of focus. The difference between us was one of vision. She had a preexisting conception of what she wanted to accomplish, presumably learned from her mother’s lifetime of socialization, whereas my organization always had something of the artificial to it. I imitated things I had seen in magazines or in films. I developed the nagging suspicion that had she been the one to organize the party for Plutus, she wouldn’t have made the mistake of leaving out items that might prove controversial. My only request this time was that the wine had to be Cheval Blanc. All the great years.
* * *
Early the next morning Marie-Anne and I decided to go for a walk toward Manayunk. The river was empty and frozen. The municipal department hadn’t yet sifted the snow off the pavement and we had to trudge along holding each other’s hand. It was heavy going and we barely made it to Boathouse Row. With a little more gumption we pressed on, toward the underpass bridge. We were surprised to find the area populated by a group of homeless men. They had brought the numerous trash cans from the park to one place and lit them all. Most of the cans had died but a couple were still going strong. Their faces glowed red from the fire. We ignored them and moved ahead into a clearing where some earlier adventurer had swept the snow off a bench facing the river.
“I still can’t believe you were on TV.”
“Too bad it went so terribly.”
“I liked it,” I said. “Except the bit at the end. Where you called people hairy, thin-skinned lepers.”
“You heard that?”
“Your microphone was on.”
She sighed, pulled me under a tree, and made me look at her. In the middle of the park she opened up her jacket and unbuttoned her shirt and turned her naked torso to me, presenting the streaks of purple on her chest, the cat scratches of illness on her belly, the excessive hair all over.
“Take a long look at yourself, then take a long look at me, and tell me who is the hairy, thin-skinned leper.”
Tears filled my eyes. I should have known her muttering was directed at herself; I should have known she was berating her body like she always did. She cried too. The last time we had both cried together was even before we had stopped sleeping together. It was the night we had come back from the doctor the first time. Except then she and I held each other and cried as one, in bed, putting our lips like bandages upon each other’s eyelids. Now we were more than a foot apart, the blood from the eyes staining our faces, using the back of our hands to smear our skin.
I reached out and touc
hed Marie-Anne’s hand. It was shaking in the cold. I buttoned up her jacket and tied her scarf around her head.
That whole day we held each other. There was nothing more to it than the reestablishment of tactility, touch. We didn’t say a word. The aim was only to show Marie-Anne that she hadn’t been shunted from the territory of the healthy. That even if the rest of the world found her a sad hog of a woman, I wouldn’t treat her like that. I had the past on my side. I had seen her as she had been before the transformation. If she sometimes forgot what she had been, I would be right there to remind her, to make rhyming verbal remembrances to be tucked away in her purse, her luggage.
Ever since she put on weight, became disfigured, she had started thinking of herself as a monster. This made her want to take revenge against all those who were able to remain beautiful—namely, all the petite and sprightly women who we came across. That was why Marie-Anne had been so intent on her ownership fantasies. By being able to render the Candaces and the Leilas of the world subservient to her, by imaginarily feeding on their blood, by owning them in their most vulnerable posture, by crushing them under her bigness, Marie-Anne had been able to destroy some of their beauty. And because I hadn’t known better, rather than putting a stop to it all, I had encouraged it, had actively participated in the vampirism.
“Who do you think is the most beautiful person?” I asked Marie-Anne after a snack of hazelnut spread and bread.
“In the world?”
“Yes, objectively.”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“I hate to say it,” I replied. “But I think it’s your mother. I never saw a more beautiful woman in my life.”
“She always was. Is it wrong to say that sometimes I miss her just because I feel like I am denied being able to look at her?”
“We can’t help what we find beautiful,” I said and stroked Marie-Anne’s rounded-moon face.
I guided her to the living room and we slid down to the carpet, leaning against the sofa. I searched for the film with Isabelle Adjani and found it after a moment. I took it out of the case and slid it in. I didn’t show Marie-Anne the inside of the cover where her father’s inscription was written. I simply let the film get started. She watched with great curiosity in her eyes.
The opening scene showed Adjani arriving in Halifax by boat, in pursuit of the man who she loved, for whom she would eventually suffer madness. As the atmospheric darkness from the film washed over, both Marie-Anne and I became somber, our laughter bowing out from the room. I kept staring at Marie-Anne’s face, to gauge it for reaction, to be astonished by the way she was mesmerized. She was aware that she was quite drunk, so she was a little skeptical of what she was seeing.
“Is that . . . ?” she pointed. “Who is that?”
“That is Isabelle Adjani.”
“It’s not my mom?”
“No,” I said. “It’s Isabelle Adjani.”
Her big, lightly rippling eyes went soft. Deep inside it seemed like there was a pile of petals in them. “That’s definitely the most beautiful person in the world.”
We watched the film together with a kind of college-era intimacy, drifting away from the scenes to kiss, touch, fondle, and grope each other. We remembered the film again and tried to seem informed about everything from Victor Hugo to Les Mis to Napoleon, only to realize we had no idea what was happening on screen. But somehow we kept blubbering to each other, a man and a woman after so long getting to be a boy and a girl.
A little while later Marie-Anne decided she didn’t want to watch any more. Her arms shook from the effort required to stand, but with some help from me she was able to get up. She took a deep breath and gathered herself and then, with an invitational finger, told me to follow her to the bedroom.
Inside she started to undo her clothes a little and asked me to tell her where she would meet Isabelle Adjani. She was ready, as always, to turn me into her ideal self.
“You won’t meet her,” I replied.
“I won’t?”
“No,” I said. “You will become her.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I will be with her.”
“But why?”
“Because you’ve forgotten what it feels like to be beautiful. Maybe by immersion you can remember.”
She said she was scared. I told her not to be. And so that day when I took off Marie-Anne’s clothes she wasn’t aghast by her body because she was Adjani and flawless. And when I kissed her softly she wasn’t ashamed to kiss back because she was Adjani and sensual. And when she yielded her being to me she wasn’t afraid because she was Adjani and there was nothing to fear. We weren’t the first people in the world to beat back the tyrannies of disease by imagining ourselves as more beautiful than we were, and we wouldn’t be the last.
* * *
That night we went to Bishop’s Collar for a drink. I remembered to take the multicolored pen to give back to the rude bartender. Before turning away I informed him that the woman he had mistaken for my mother was actually my wife. The bartender was so surprised by my statement that he straightened up and extended his hand. “I never caught your name.”
“They call me M.”
“Just M.?”
“Yeah.”
“What does it stand for?”
“Whatever you want,” I said. “M. is for man. M. is for menace. M. could be my name. M. is for madness. M. starts the name of my wife.”
The bartender grumbled, crinkled his noise, and took to attending other patrons.
When I came back Marie-Anne wore a smile. She held my stool as I jumped on it, my feet dangling.
“You’re so good to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You seem to think that when you walk a few feet away from me I can’t hear you anymore. But I’m like a bird. I see and hear everything you do.” She raised her chin in the bartender’s direction.
After two Long Island iced teas each, which Marie-Anne pointed out was reminiscent of our honeymoon, we teetered our way home. It was hard to remember, in our mind-altered state, exactly what path we took back, whether up Pennsylvania, or through the alley next to Figs restaurant. But I remembered clearly what happened when we got inside.
Marie-Anne kept hold of my arm and took me to the bathroom. She had me sit down on the edge of the tub and lifted up the toilet seat. With a nervous nod she walked toward the medicine cabinet and took out the bottles of vitamins that had, at last, ended up in their appropriate place. She unscrewed their tops and one by one started plunking the pills into the toilet. Every time I asked why she was throwing perfectly good vitamins away, she shushed me and returned to the project.
Once finished with the bottle she opened the cover of the toilet and pulled out two more bottles that she had hidden, dumping the contents away with each hand, a fistful at a time. With a deep breath she sat down on the toilet seat and turned my way.
“Those aren’t vitamins. They are steroid pills. I’ve been artificially spiking my cortisol levels.”
“I don’t understand.”
The condition Marie-Anne actually had was called Munchausen syndrome, something she had been carrying around since she was a child. It caused her to fake injuries and illnesses in order to garner sympathy. It wasn’t genetic, it was psychiatric. Often the victim of Munchausen became extremely adept at mimicking the most far-fetched of diseases. This was the case with Marie-Anne and the cortisol imbalance. She had engineered it. All of it. The hirsuitism; the painful periods; the weight gain.
“It started when I was five,” she sobbed. “I went to the bathroom and cut myself. I remember it was with my Minnie Mouse scissors. That was how I got my mom’s attention. When I was injured was the only time she would really talk to me kindly. You know how kids are. I just kept doing it. Anytime she was mad, anytime she was busy with her friends, anytime she made up new rules, I gave myself something. A cut. A fall. A twist of the ankle. I even let a boy slap me once so I could g
o home with a bloody lip. By college I figured out I had a problem. The counselors put me in therapy. My way of controlling it was by writing stories. Something therapeutic about making up other things besides illness. That’s when I met you. That’s why I turned to you—because you encouraged me to write. My mom wasn’t enough to make me stop from hurting myself. Only you were.”
I reached out for her. “But you relapsed. You relapsed hard. Why?”
“I relapsed when I found out I couldn’t have children. Three years ago. I went to the doctor and learned I was broken. Inexplicable infertility, they called it. I should have told you. I should have let you hate me. I should have let you leave me. Instead I manipulated you for love. For pity.”
She was a crying mess. I stood up and gathered her. The shower curtain got pulled into the embrace. We stayed silent for a long time. The drops of the water ran down the curtain and onto the floor by way of the bones of our feet.
My mind reeled at the vicious circularity of it all. The vitamins to conceal the cortisol. The Munchausen to conceal the infertility. One lie built on another, an orchestra of dissimulation. The world regarded me and saw a practitioner of subterfuge. In fact, it was my wife who was dormant, latent, mysterious. All my opportunities to abscond were gone. All the opportunities to create a new life were gone.
Marie-Anne was the one to whom I belonged and to whom I returned.
* * *
The party was to be held at Figs. The small restaurant tucked into Meredith Street on the other side of the art museum annex. We rented out an entire section. Marie-Anne wanted take over the whole establishment, but the hostess insisted on keeping a few tables open for walk-in customers.
The day of the party came quickly. Marie-Anne had charted the weather well in advance and picked an exquisite day. Not a cloud in the sky. Moderate temperatures and, because she had paid the security guards to serve as valets, there were no parking troubles. But at the last moment, heavy clouds moved in and a steady snow started accumulating.
Marie-Anne wore tan leggings with a beige dress and a sapphire rope necklace with a matching bracelet around her left wrist. I remembered the necklace. We had bought it a few years ago, but she had never worn it before because she’d been afraid it would get damaged or lost. Now she was more confident about our earning potential.