The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

by Dinaw Mengestu

  In just a few minutes, we pull up in front of the Royal Castle, which from the outside still looks like the Chinese restaurant it had once been. The red awning and generic Asian typeface cast against a gold background stayed even after the menu had been reduced to buffalo wings, french fries, and hamburgers, and the large circular booths with the lazy Susans were replaced with stages, poles, and a row of chairs that remind me of a high school auditorium.

  Instead of arguing or protesting, Joseph and I follow Kenneth in. We take a table in the back of the club, which is entirely empty except for us. Our isolation feels ridiculous. There’s no one else to share our shame with, and when a topless waitress comes over to take our order, none of us can muster enough courage to look her in the face.

  “Why are we here, Ken?”

  “Because, Stephanos. This is what people do at the end of a hard day.”

  As if to prove his point, he undoes the top button on his shirt and loosens his tie a few inches. I’ve never met his boss, but I can hear his voice ringing in the back of Kenneth’s head. “Still fighting the good fight, Kenneth?” it says.

  We order three scotches, drink them quickly, and order three more. Women come and go off the stage every three and a half minutes, dancing halfheartedly to the ’80s pop songs I used to love listening to in my store. Prince. INXS. The Cure. When they finish dancing they saunter over to our table and introduce themselves. They all have names from Greek and Roman mythology: Venus, Apollonia, Aphrodite—names that promise an unattainable bit of love and heaven. Before they can offer us anything, we hand them two singles each, and Kenneth tells them all that they’re beautiful.

  “Beautiful,” he says, with his lips pursed, eyes turned to the ceiling in a feigned state of ecstatic reverie.

  The drinks are ten dollars, and each one lasts for exactly three songs, which is equal to three dancers, which means we’re spending about a dollar a minute, and that in sixty-eight minutes, I will have spent all the money I earned that day.

  I take my last eight dollars out of my pocket and lay it on the table.

  “Once that’s done, so am I.”

  Joseph slides the bills back toward me. “Keep it,” he says. “The rest of the evening is on me.”

  Kenneth pours back his scotch and slides the glass across the table so it almost falls on my lap. “No,” he says. “The rest of the evening is on me.”

  They go back and forth for several minutes, each one insisting repeatedly that the “evening is on me” even though it’s been clear from the start that Kenneth will be the one to pay. Still, what matters just as much as the outcome is how they get there. With the decision settled, Kenneth hands control over the rest of the night to Joseph, who places one hand on each of our backs and says, “Gentlemen, it is time for us to go.”

  There is nothing left of downtown D.C. by the time we walk outside. The city has emptied itself of its bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, secretaries, diplomats, lobbyists, and bankers. The shutters are pulled down in front of all the storefronts, and graffiti has been scrawled all over them. Beso. Crazy Nigga. East Capitol Crew. The only people we pass on the street are all well dressed and well heeled, on their way home to the suburbs of Virginia or to one of the handful of luxurious restaurants that stand as clearly isolated from one another as a pair of trees in an open plain. The Capitol’s white dome seems to hover in front of us, and if I turn just a little to the right, I can see the red eye sitting at the peak of the Washington Monument. There is no mystery left in any of those buildings for us, and at times I wonder how there ever could have been.

  I stop in the middle of the road as we cross the street toward the car and look up and hard while Kenneth and Joseph walk on. I’m waiting to see if I can recall that emotion now—a silent, almost fearful awe that came when I first saw each building from a passing van, and that continued to come involuntarily for years afterward. My mother and father both claimed to have felt something similar every time they saw the emperor in Ethiopia—power embodied, as it were, in a single man.

  I wink at the monument, salute the Capitol, and then run to catch up with Joseph and Kenneth, who are both already sitting in the car waiting for me.

  “What were you doing back there, Stephanos?” Joseph asks me as I slide into the backseat.

  I shrug. I don’t know what to tell him, but he gives me a grin that says he already knows. After we finished our shifts at the Capitol Hotel, the three of us often spent the rest of our evenings perched on one of the benches across from the White House, or on the tree-lined paths leading up to the Lincoln Memorial.

  “Look at those buildings,” Joseph said once. “I would have…” He stopped there, stuck in midsentence. It was one of the few times in all the years I have known him that he has ever been speechless. We rarely talked about the buildings explicitly, but I know that Joseph and Kenneth both spent hours standing in front of Lincoln’s massive, imposing figure, seated on his throne with an indifferent gaze cast toward the city. During his first few months in America, Joseph had memorized the Gettysburg Address off the memorial’s walls, and spent several nights watching the sun rise from its steps. It’s been years since either of them has gone near those buildings, and how could you blame them? Reality has settled in, and they’re both still waiting to recover.

  We decide to end our evening at a small, dark, crowded bar on the northwest edge of the city. The crowd tonight is mixed. A half-dozen Nigerians, all friends with the owner, are pressed up against the bar, loudly ordering drinks and shots for one another. At the other end is an old white man with a beard drinking slowly by himself. Scattered throughout the booths and tables in the back are a couple dozen young white kids—the first to live in this neighborhood in thirty years. Kenneth and I slide into a booth and begin to drink. Joseph goes to the back of the bar and puts a dollar into the jukebox. We’ve been waiting for this moment to one degree or another since our first drink of the night. It takes about fifteen more minutes before the song begins, and with the first chord, we raise our glasses and toast. When the refrain starts, the three of us lean forward and sing along:

  But you won’t fool the children of the revolution.

  No you won’t fool the children of the revolution.

  Over and over, until the song ends, by which point we’ve all finished our drinks and are ready for another.

  The first time we heard that song we were sitting two booths farther back. We still worked at the Capitol Hotel; Joseph and Kenneth were sharing an apartment just a few blocks away from the bar. The song played, and Joseph stood up drunkenly and declared, “That is us. We are the children of the revolution.” His accent was heavier then, weighted with tinges of French that struggled under a formal locution to come through. It took him several tries before we understood what he was saying, each attempt punctuated by an emphatic thrust toward the air holding the music, and in holding the music, holding Joseph as well. When we finally did understand him, Kenneth and I stood up, and together the three of us nodded our heads to the words we barely understood, the refrain repeating its unintended sympathies over and over.

  Now, when the song is over, it’s hard not to laugh at our misplaced enthusiasm. We had been in America for only a couple of years when we first heard it, and we did believe that we were children of a revolution, and not only because we were willing to be grand. We all had stories of families we missed and would never see again. We spoke in our broken English of Africa’s tyrannies, which had yet to grow tedious. And we had our own stories of death and violence to match.

  The song plays two more times over the course of the next two hours, and each time, like children being coaxed into a conversation, we sing along.

  4

  The first time Judith invited me over for dinner, she had Naomi slip a note into my mailbox.

  Dear Mr. Stephanos,

  My mother and I would like to invite you to our house for dinner. On November 28. We would be very happy if you could come.

  Judi
th and Naomi

  The letter arrived the day before Thanksgiving and carried me through the holiday. It was written in Naomi’s delicate, tiny handwriting on a canary yellow piece of stationery that had Judith’s name at the bottom. It was folded into a square small enough to fit into the center of my palm. Three days after getting the letter, I closed my store one hour early for the first time in years. It was an exceptionally cold night, and by seven-thirty an almost impenetrable hush had slipped over the neighborhood. Some people had rushed home from work, while others never left their house to begin with. The few people who came into the store that evening did so just to escape the cold. They lingered for ten or fifteen minutes over whatever it was they had supposedly come in to buy, and then left abruptly, feigning disappointment or frustration as they shook their heads, blew into their hands, and tucked their chins into their collars.

  I went home early and changed into a neatly pressed button-down white shirt and a pair of slightly worn gray wool slacks Kenneth had handed down to me. The cuff links, a holdover from my father’s days in the Ethiopian government, had the old Ethiopian flag with the Lion of Judah and his crooked crown on it. They were the only things of my father I had left. He used to keep them in a small gray jewelry box with the lid open on top of the dresser in his bedroom, although I can’t remember ever having seen him wear them. What I can remember is him holding them out to me and saying with a slight, sarcastic lilt to his voice, “Someday all this will be yours.” I don’t think he ever actually intended for them to become heirlooms. They were just cheap cuff links from an old, decaying regime, but you hold on to what you can and hope the meaning comes later.

  Before leaving the house I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and practiced my introduction. I brushed forward the edges of my thinning hair and patted down the sides of my small Afro. My reflection stared back disapprovingly. I had aged, but there was nothing distinguished about me. The laugh lines around my mouth had burrowed in, and there was more of my forehead than I cared to show. I smiled and tried to find a hint of a younger and better version of myself, but there was no doing. He was gone.

  I stepped back from the mirror and practiced my introduction. I wanted to be ready for the moment Judith opened the door and found me standing on her steps. I wanted to strike the right chord, leave no room for error.

  “Hello. Great to see you.”

  “I’m honored to be here. Thank you for having me.”

  “It’s a pleasure to be here. It was so kind of you to invite me.”

  I tried to take my time walking to Judith’s house, but all I had were two flights of stairs, two porches, and a few feet of sidewalk to separate us. I took the steps slowly. When I reached my front door I still had nine minutes to pass, so I tied and untied my shoelaces in front of my house. I looked up at the sky to see if there were any stars that I could count, or a moon to describe, but there was nothing, only clouds that still retained a muted shade of pink left from the sun.

  When I finally rang the doorbell, Naomi answered. Her mother had tried to braid her hair into a row of plaits, but it had come out as a half-dozen uneven, lopsided braids that erupted into a tuft in the back. It gave Naomi an oddly menacing look that somehow seemed intended. She stood in the doorway looking like a lunatic and stared at me as if I were the man responsible for all of the world’s frustrated desires, a fool who accidentally gave bad directions to people on their honeymoons, contemptuous but good-natured.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  I looked down at my watch. I was still five minutes early.

  “I’m sorry, madame,” I said, bowing my head just slightly. “But my chauffeur had a terrible time finding the house. I would fire him, but he is after all just a monkey, and you know how they can be.”

  “Henry?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  She shook her head, as if to say I understand, more than you can ever imagine, just how difficult a monkey chauffeur can be. This was not, of course, the only time I had pinned something on a monkey.

  “My mom said you should wait in the living room,” Naomi said.

  She turned and darted up the stairs two at a time. As she did, the braids in the back of her hair bounced off her billowy Afro.

  This was the first time I had ever been in Judith’s living room, although I had seen fractions of it dozens of times before. At night, the heavy red curtains that draped over the front windows were pulled back far enough to allow more than a peek into the living room. It was the same thing with all of the other newly refurbished houses in the neighborhood; curtains provocatively peeled back to reveal a warmly lit room with forest green couches, modern silver lamps that craned their necks like swans, and sleek glass coffee tables with fresh flowers bursting on top. There was something about affluence that needed exposure, that resisted closed windows and poor lighting and made a willing spectacle of everything. The houses invited, practically begged and demanded, to be watched. When I took my walks at night, this was what I did. I stared into the living rooms of others. I stood across the street on the tips of my toes and tried to catch a glimpse of the kitchen, or the dining room, or the paintings on the wall. Kandinsky and Rothko prints over the sealed-up marble fireplaces; long, elegant dining tables made to look as if they had been hand-carved out of a single block of wood; walls that were painted a subtle shade of gold that was perhaps picked up by the massive vase of plastic sunflowers in the corner. Rarely did I ever see the people who lived in those houses, as if each were merely display-case props of revitalization. Sometimes I thought of what I was doing as window shopping.

  An old record player and radio the size of a desk, made of wood and with a dozen chrome knobs, sat in the hallway. The living room had a heavy black wall-mounted phone from the early twentieth century, and a silver clock stuck permanently on two-twenty. The leather couches, chestnut colored and densely packed, were separated by a wooden coffee table that had at least fifty small drawers along its side. It was all so solid, comfortable, and familiar, as if Judith had deliberately picked only pieces of furniture that had proven their ability to withstand time.

  From somewhere in the house, Judith called out, “I’ll be right down. I just have to finish something up.” Behind her voice I could hear Naomi’s barely restrained cries to be left alone. In one of those rooms upstairs, Judith was pulling away at her daughter’s hair, while her daughter was pulling away from her mother’s confused, desperate hands. It was a subtle negotiation of unspoken differences.

  When the two of them came down the stairs fifteen minutes later, each looked spent and frustrated. Naomi’s hair was now all in braids, more or less evenly separated. She led the way, with her mother just a step behind. Judith was wearing her glasses, which gave her small, narrow face an added sense of depth that seemed to be previously missing.

  “I’m sorry we kept you waiting so long. Naomi and I had some unfinished business to settle.”

  We kissed each other on both cheeks. Judith’s hand lingered for what I thought was a second beyond polite on my back.

  “You’re the first dinner guest we’ve had in our new house.”

  “Well, I feel honored.”

  “You should. Naomi hates having other people in the house.”

  “Is that true, Naomi?”

  Naomi was standing pressed against the wall with her hands tucked behind her.

  “Yup,” she said.

  She popped her lips hard on the “p” for emphasis as she rocked back on her heels.

  “You’ve got good taste for someone your age,” I told her.

  Judith led me to the dining room, which was still overrun with boxes of books that she said she didn’t know what to do with. Most of them, she said, were terribly boring academic books that she didn’t want to think about or look at anymore. In another life, she had been a professor of American political history.

  “And for a while, it was great,” she said. “I loved it. The students, the summers off. I could pick Nao
mi up from school every day. And at night I still had the energy to go out for dinner or watch a movie.”

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “That life seems so far away now. Naomi’s father left. That didn’t help. We moved from Chicago to Boston to Virginia, and now here. Nothing felt good enough anymore.”

  She had the habit of tucking and untucking her hair from behind her right ear as she spoke. She hesitated for a few seconds before speaking again.

  “Suddenly I saw myself twenty years in the future saying the same thing over and over to students who stayed the same age, and I couldn’t believe that this was what I had planned on. It’s hard sometimes to remember why we do anything in the first place. It’s nice to think there’s a purpose, or even a real decision that turns everything in one direction, but that’s not always true, is it? We just fall into our lives. How did you get to own a grocery store?”

  “Some people are just lucky,” I said.

  “Is that what that was?”

  “It also helps if you don’t care where you land.”

  Instead of sitting at the dining-room table, Judith suggested we eat on the couch.

  “We can be less formal that way, don’t you think?” she said.

  I nodded my head in agreement. We ate our dinner off porcelain plates with gold-trimmed edges while sitting on the leather couches. Judith and Naomi were spread out on one while I sat across from them with my food delicately balanced on my lap. I watched every bite as it traveled from the tip of my fork into my mouth. I tried to erase any sound of food being ground into bits by chewing slowly, but it was never quite enough. I was still there, with all of my flaws, in Judith’s immaculate living room, which was larger and grander than anything I had ever sat and eaten in since coming to Logan Circle. I kept my legs close together and limited my movements to a few simple nods of the head. My plate teetered on a few occasions, and had it fallen on the newly restored hardwood floors, I’m confident I would have shattered with it.