We ate in silence for several minutes, the only sounds being those of our forks scraping gently against the plates. Finally Judith made a desperate attempt to overcome the sudden silence.
“Did you ever get to read Ralph Emerson or Alexis de Tocqueville?” she asked.
“A little,” I said.
“Years ago,” I added a moment later to cover up the lie.
“Americans hate history,” she said. She began to lecture then about Emerson and Tocqueville, about America’s repudiation of history and its antipathy toward anything that resembled the past. Her eyes trailed off to a corner of the living room, where they stayed locked. She spoke eloquently and passionlessly, her words probably repeated a hundred times over the years in front of crowded classrooms. She wasn’t speaking to me or Naomi but to the room, which needed to be filled with at least one of our voices. I nodded my head and listened attentively, trying to find a narrow gap in which I could insert a well-timed grunt of agreement.
“We always want to believe that we’re the first to do anything,” she continued. “We’re always racing something or someone, even if it’s all just in our head. We raced across America to get to the Pacific, and then we raced to build a railroad to connect it all. We raced to the moon. We raced to build as many bombs as was humanly possible. I wonder if now we haven’t run out of things to race against. I think the moment that happens, we’ll have nothing to do but look back. Then we’ll know if it was worth it.”
Naomi was leaning against her mother’s legs, which were folded up on the couch specifically for that purpose. She was bored and staring at her fingernails. She chewed on the corner of her index finger while Judith talked. I wondered how many times she had heard this before, if she could repeat it word for word if asked.
“I should have taught a class called ‘Races.’ It could have been great.”
“It’s still not too late,” I added.
“No. It is. I have a year-long sabbatical that I’m already halfway through and I can’t see myself going back.”
Naomi, who hadn’t spoken throughout Judith’s condensed lecture, finally found an opening to jump in.
“You should get a job,” she said. “You could work at the store with Mr. Stephanos.”
“But then what would he do?”
“He could watch me.”
Judith leaned over her knees and wrapped her arms around Naomi’s neck. I tried to look away as she did but instead caught her eyes staring at me from the side. It was my first victory of the evening.
“That doesn’t sound too bad to me,” I said.
After dinner Judith offered me a tour of the house while Naomi prepared for bed.
“It was amazing what this place looked like when I bought it. Parts of the floor were missing; most of the paint had fallen off; almost every window had a crack in it.”
Every floor of the house had been meticulously restored. The second had been turned into a bedroom for Naomi, and a massive library and TV room; the first, into the living room and dining room we had just left. It was just as the construction workers had said. There were sliding doors over the built-in bookshelves that lined the walls, and on every floor there was a bathroom.
“They’re for Naomi,” she said. We were on the top floor, and Judith had just pointed to the fourth and last bathroom.
“We used to have these terrible fights. They only got worse after her father left. She hated both of us for that, but I was the only one around for her to take it out on, which made her hate me even more. We would fight and she would lock herself in one of the bedrooms for hours at a time. There was nothing I could do to get her out. A couple of times I left her alone and she ended up running away from the house. She never went far. I actually found her once in a closet right by the front door. But still, I always went mad trying to find her. I pictured her hurt or kidnapped, or some other awful thought that I couldn’t fight back, and I would take off running, but I guess you already know that part.
“I made a promise to her when we moved here. I told her she could have all the space she wanted. In return, she had to promise to stop running out of the house when she got upset. Now, when she gets mad, she can lock herself on any floor of the house and never have to worry about seeing me, or anyone else.”
She smiled, and then laughed a little, holding her hand to her mouth.
“I know this sounds ridiculous. But it works, most of the time, and right now that’s all I really care about. This is our third house in as many years, and if it took a half-dozen bathrooms and as many floors to make it work, that’s what I would have done.”
I couldn’t help but admire Judith’s devotion to her daughter, precisely because of its excesses. Who didn’t want to be loved like that? She didn’t apologize for anything, and I believed her completely when she said she would have built half a dozen bathrooms if needed. But it wasn’t just because she wanted to make Naomi happy. All you had to do was look at her eyes for a few minutes to see how tired and full of regret she was. She wanted peace; a hundred extra feet of plumbing were surely worth that.
“This must sound ridiculous to you,” she said.
“Nope,” I said. I popped my “p” just as hard, if not harder, than Naomi had done earlier. It was a silly thing to have done, but it made Judith laugh with relief, which was more than I could have hoped for. This time, instead of covering her mouth with her hand, she stretched out her fingers and without thinking took two of mine in hers. She leaned in just far enough for me to meet her face less than halfway. It wasn’t a kiss so much as it was a gentle press, or an extended graze of lips, full of a sudden, almost crushing tenderness. We held it for as long as we could, three, maybe four seconds at most, and then the moment passed.
Judith took a slight step back and said, “I should go check on Naomi.”
“It must be getting late,” I said.
“I’ll walk you to the door,” she said.
She walked me to the door and leaned her head outside so she could see my building.
“Get home safely,” she said.
“I’ll try.”
Less than a minute later and I was climbing the steps to my own apartment. There hadn’t been enough space between her house and mine for me to linger over the evening. Within a few minutes I was struggling to fit my key into my door, since the light on the landing had burned out months ago and no one had ever thought of replacing it, and then I was turning the knob and leaning into the door, which always creaked as if it were about to fall off its hinges. When I turned the living-room light on and stared into my apartment, an inevitable sense of regret swept over me. How much better would it have been to have spent even just a few minutes walking in the cold? Or to have sat on the stairwell in the pitch black, unable to see my hand in front of my face? There I could have replayed pieces of our conversation, reenacted our gestures, imagined alternatives. In the harsh light of my apartment, there was only room for practical concerns. The entire place was shabbier, smaller, and more desolate than I remembered, as if while I was eating dinner someone had entered my apartment and stolen a few years off the furniture. The only thing that wasn’t scavenged from the trash was a solid oak desk that I had saved for three months to buy. Everything else bore the stamp of too many lives and too many people. The couch was draped with a heavy navy blue fabric I had bought from a garment store to cover up the unknown stains and worn armrests. The coffee table was balanced by a stack of magazines on one side and an old bowl on the other. The rug in the center of the room had been left by the previous tenant, who had most likely inherited it from the tenant before him. The ends were so frayed that at least twice a month I had to trim a piece off to keep from tripping on the loops of extended thread. Five years later now and one end of the rug was noticeably longer than the other; the corners had been rounded off, and then cut like a pie sliced into at odd, uneven angles. The television had knob dials and terrible reception, and it sat on an old trunk that looked solid from a distance, but was
in fact practically paper thin. A man, I told myself, is defined not by his possessions but by the company he keeps. That was a phrase I had stolen from my father, along with this: the character of a man is like the tail of a monkey; it is always behind him. I knew from experience that moments of sorrow and self-pity were the best times to think of these old phrases and axioms. Not because they provided any comfort, but because, like any other deliberate act of memory, they could supplant the present with their own incorrigible truth.
From my living-room window I could see the lights in Judith’s house. There was at least one room on every floor that was fully lit. I decided there was something monstrous about a house with so many lights, something distinctly unjust.
After I’d been standing there for only a few minutes, the lights on the second floor began to flicker on and off. It was a signal from Naomi. We began to turn our lights off and on in an imaginary Morse code dialogue. I could picture her standing by the switch, eagerly flicking the lights until her head began to hurt. Finally, instead of continuing to respond, I just stood in the dark and tried not to think of her disappointment.
The next day Joseph and Kenneth came to the store and I told them about my dinner with Judith. I had mentioned her before—the house, Naomi, our conversations at the store—but only infrequently, and with no more passion than I discussed anything else that might have happened on that given day. When I told them about the dinner and brief kiss, the two of them looked up from their chessboard at each other, and not me.
“You see?” Joseph said. “You should listen to me more often.” He was wagging one of his chubby fingers at Kenneth, who was now leaning back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach.
“What can I say? You were right.”
“About what?” I asked.
“Jo-Jo said you were…what’s the word you used?”
“Enamored.”
“Yes. Enamored by this woman.”
When I looked over at Joseph he was struggling and failing to contain his grin.
“You have nothing to be embarrassed about, Stephanos. You’ve been in America for almost seventeen years. It’s about time you dated a white woman.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“He’s right,” Kenneth jumped in. “You spend too much time by yourself. You’re in this store all alone, and then you go home. It’s no way for a man to live.”
“What about the little girl’s father?” Joseph asked me.
“It was just dinner,” I said.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never asked her.”
“I imagine if I saw the three of you walking down the street, I would think you were it.”
There was a second of silence before Kenneth reached across the table and smacked Joseph on the arm.
“Sorry, Stephanos. You know what I meant.”
“Of course,” I told him.
Joseph won the chess game easily, as he always did. Whenever he plays against Kenneth or me, he does so absentmindedly, his fingers dancing over the board as if he were seeing it for the first time. When he moves a piece, he never focuses on the spot he’s moving it to. Instead, he turns his eyes back to his opponent, or even better, to someone else in the room, lending an air of inevitability to every move he makes. As a young man, he had been one of the better chess players in Kinshasa, known for his quiet, restrained demeanor even in the face of certain defeat. He had stories of all-night chess tournaments held in dingy cafés and bars, games that erupted into beatings, stabbings, and on occasion, shootings. “We had no jobs, we were done with school, no family, no money, so we played chess all day. It was what we did.” Clusters, and in some cases, surrogate families of young men formed around the game. Some were illiterate and had spent years fighting from the bush; others, like Joseph, were born into affluent families who had paid for French and English tutors before losing everything to Mobutu and his corrupt, bloated government. They had a religious devotion to the game, a respect for its handful of rules and almost infinite variations born, as Joseph said, out of a shared sense of gratitude for having at least one space where their decisions mattered. “Nobody,” he said once, “understands chess like an African.”
After the game was over, Joseph settled back into a quiet contemplation that involved deep breaths and long pauses between each sip of beer. Winning these games gave him nothing. Kenneth was rearranging the pieces on the board, trying to discover where he had gone wrong. If and when he figured it out, he would rock back in his chair and exclaim, “Now I see what you did, you tricky bastard. That will never work again with me.”
“You know,” Joseph said to me, “I dated a white woman once. She was from Boston. She had short curly red hair, so the teachers nicknamed her Rouge.”
“When?” I asked him.
“A long time ago.”
“In the Congo?”
“In Zaire. She was a Peace Corps volunteer.”
“For how long?”
“Almost two years.”
“You didn’t waste any time, did you?”
“What can I say? It was meant to be. We were teaching at the same school.”
“And then what?”
“She went back to Boston.”
“And you lost touch?”
“We never tried to keep it. Maybe I wrote her a letter once or twice, but nothing more than that. We had talked briefly about getting married and having little red Afro babies together, but we both knew better. She lives here now. I see her every once in a while. She’s come into the restaurant a few times for lunch.”
“What do you say to her?”
“Nothing.”
“Not even once?”
“I don’t think she recognizes me.”
“How could she not?” I asked him.
He finished his beer and patted his stomach.
“I was skinnier then,” he said. “You should have seen me. I was so beautiful. You wouldn’t have believed your eyes.”
5
On May 4 I wake up earlier than usual with my head still clouded from last night’s drinking. The sun has barely cracked through the day, and I can still hear Joseph’s voice singing in the bar. As I swing my legs onto the floor, I make a firm resolution to myself. To go on living halfheartedly is ridiculous, I think. Here I am; this is it. Starting today, I am going to press on valiantly. I am going to march through the hours and weeks and let no disappointment, regardless of how large, steer me from my course or bring me down. I am going to open my store early. I am going to catch the morning rush-hour commuters and make them mine.
By seven a.m. I’m fully dressed and walking out the door. Five minutes later, I’m standing in front of my store, pulling the keys out of my pocket. All around me people are walking, rushing, and for the first time since Judith and Naomi left the neighborhood, I am one of them. The morning is bright and mild; it is a picture-perfect May day with low humidity and surges of cool air that dry the sweat on my forehead as quickly as it forms. The day, I tell myself, is nothing to be afraid of. Life ticks on just as it always has. It was only by a trick of the imagination that I had come to believe I could step outside of it. Sunlight is tilting through the space between the leaves, lighting up the edges of the circle nearest my store. The sight is so perfect that I pause for a second, keys in hand, with the deliberate intention of admiring it.
I lift the lock from its latch, grab hold of the lowest rung on the grate, and with three quick, solid jerks hurl it over my head and send it crashing. That same sound is echoing from stores all across this city; it is we, the small storekeepers and newspaper vendors, who are drawing it back to life.
The grate crashes and locks into place, and as it does, a thin white envelope, slid into a corner of the door, flutters to the ground. My name is typed neatly on the front, with no postage or address. I pick it up and hold it against the sky. The sun catches it from the back. Through the envelope I can make out one clear line: Dear Mr. Stephanos.
Dear Mr. Stephanos. My knees give, just a bit, at the sight of the words. Something—call it hope, optimism—drops in my stomach and goes running. Dear Mr. Stephanos. A sign of official business. Never in my life have I done well with official business. Official business is prompt and efficient and demanding. I have a stack of official letters from vendors and utility companies and a credit card that all begin the same way: Dear Mr. Stephanos. In each of them there is a simple, unwavering demand for money, for which I’ve had no response except to close my eyes and wish desperately like a child that it would all go away. I have done the best I can under the circumstances. I write out checks for meager amounts: $10.34 here, $3.29 there. And when I can’t, I have learned not to pick up my phone or read my mail for a week or two at a time.
I bring the letter with me into the store. I don’t turn on the lights or lift the blinds. With the exception of the lifted grate, there is no sign that I am open for business. No one, I notice, even bothers to slow down or look in.
I lock the door behind me and place the letter on the counter. I turn it over once, and then twice. Courage, my father used to say, is being able to face the truth, regardless of what it may be, and remembering that, I tear the letter open along the side and take the kind of deep breath that’s supposed to brace you for bad news. I begin at the top of the page.
From the law firm of Elkin and Govind to Mr. Sepha Stephanos.
The name of the firm is familiar. I’ve seen it before on bus advertisements and on daytime television commercials. I can’t decide whether receiving a letter from a firm that advertises on plastic place cards to a captive audience makes the situation even worse. I never expected to be on the receiving end of a letter from a law firm that uses people lying in hospital beds as part of their advertising campaign, but life can be cruel and unpredictable, which is precisely what such firms are there to remind us of.
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears Page 6