But he wasn’t single. And in eleven years he could surely have, for example, moved across the state border to Connecticut, where no-fault divorce did exist, or found the six or so weeks required to establish legal residence in Nevada and cut this Gordian knot. This he had not done. Once, in his cups, he had confided to Solanka that for all the city’s generosity in providing the grateful male with multiple-choice options in dating, there was a snag. “They all want the big words,” he protested. “They want forever, serious, heavy, long-term. If it’s not grand passion, it’s not happening. This is why they’re so lonely. There aren’t enough men to go around, but they won’t shop if they can’t buy. They aren’t open to the concept of the rental, the time share. They’re fucked-up, man. They’re looking for real estate in a market that’s crazily high, but they know it’ll be going even higher soon.” In this version of the truth, Rhinehart’s incomplete divorce bought him breathing space, lebensraum. Women would try him out, for he was beautiful and charming, and, until they got sick of the endlessness of it, would wait.
There was also, however, another possible reading of the situation. Up where Rhinehart now mostly lived, on the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Diamond as Big as the Ritz, he was literally outclassed and, the moment he fell into the trap of wanting what was on offer up there on Olympus, also out of his depth. He was, remember, their toy, and while girls will play with toys, they don’t marry them. So maybe being half-married, stuck in this endlessly divorcing condition, was also a way for Rhinehart to kid himself. In reality there probably wasn’t much of a line forming to wait for him. Single, and aging—he had turned forty—now he was almost out of time. Almost—the killer word for any ambitious lady-killer—ineligible.
Malik Solanka, a decade and a half older than Jack Rhinehart and a dozen dozen times more inhibited, had often watched and listened with envious wonder as Rhinehart went about his life’s business in so unshamedly male a manner. The combat zones, the women, the dangerous sports, the life of a man of deeds. Even the now-abandoned poetry had been of the virile Ted Hughes school. Often Solanka had felt that in spite of his seniority in years, it was Rhinehart who was the master and he the student. A mere maker of dolls must bow his head before a wind surfer, a sky diver, a bungee jumper, a rock climber, a man whose idea of fun it was to go to Hunter College twice a week and run up and down forty flights of stairs. Being a boy—but this was getting too close to his forbidden, obliterated back-story—was a skill Malik Solanka had not been allowed to acquire in full.
Patrick Kluivert scored for the Dutch, and both Solanka and Rhinehart jumped to their feet, waving bottles of Mexican beer and shouting. Then the doorbell rang and Rhinehart said, without preamble, “Oh, by the way, I think I’m in love. I invited her to join us. Hope that’s okay.” This was not an original line. Traditionally it signaled the arrival of what Rhinehart would very privately call the new waitress. What followed, however, was new. “She’s one of yours,” Rhinehart said over his shoulder as he got up to open the door. “Indian diaspora. One hundred years of servitude. In the eighteen nineties her ancestors went as indentured laborers to work in what’s-its-name. Lilliput-Blefuscu. Now they run the sugarcane production and the economy would fall apart without them, but you know how it is wherever Indians go. People don’t like them. Dey works too hard and dey keeps to deyself and dey acts so clang uppity. Ask anyone. Ask Idi Amin.”
On the television the Dutch were playing sublime soccer, but the match had suddenly become an irrelevance. Malik Solanka was thinking that the woman who had just entered Rhinehart’s living room was by some distance the most beautiful Indian woman—the most beautiful woman—he had ever seen. Compared to the intoxicating effect of her presence, the bottle of Dos Equis in his left hand was wholly alcohol free. Other women in the world were just under six feet tall, with waist-length black hair, he supposed; and no doubt such smoky eyes were also to be found elsewhere, as also other lips as richly cushioned, other necks as slender, other legs as interminably long. On other women, too, there might be breasts like these. So what? In the words of an idiotic song from the fifties, “Bernardine,” sung in one of his raunchier moments by his mother’s favorite recording artist, the Christian conservative Pat Boone: “Your separate parts are not unknown / but the way you assemble ‘em’s all your own.” Exactly, thought Professor Solanka, drowning. Just exactly so.
Down the upper part of the woman’s right arm there was an eight-inch-long herringbone-pattern scar. When she saw him looking at it, she at once crossed her arms and put her left hand over the injury, not understanding that it made her more beautiful, that it perfected her beauty by adding an essential imperfection. By showing that she could be injured, that such astonishing loveliness could be broken in an instant, the cicatrice only emphasized what was there, and made one cherish it—my goodness, Solanka thought, what a word to use about a stranger!—all the more.
Extreme physical beauty draws all available light toward itself, becomes a shining beacon in an otherwise darkened world. Why would one peer into the encircling gloom when one could look at this kindly flame? Why talk, eat, sleep, work when such effulgence was on display? Why do anything but look, for the rest of one’s paltry life? Lumen de lumine. Staring into the sidereal unreality of her beauty, which wheeled in the room like a galaxy on fire, he was thinking that if he had been able to wish his ideal woman into being, if he’d had a magic lamp to rub, this would have been what he’d have wished for. And, at the same time, while he was mentally congratulating Rhinehart for breaking away at last from the many daughters of Paleface, he was also imagining himself with this dark Venus, he was allowing his own, closed heart to open, and so remembering once again what he spent much of his life trying to forget: the size of the crater within him, the hole left by his break with his recent and remote past, which, just perhaps, the love of such a woman could fill. Ancient, secret pain welled up in him, pleading to be healed.
“Yeah, sorry bout that, buddy” came Rhinehart’s tickled drawl from the far side of the universe. “She hits most people that way. Can’t help it. Doesn’t know how to switch it off. Neela, meet my celibate pal Malik. He’s given up women forever, as you can plainly see.” Jack was enjoying himself, Solanka noted. He forced himself back into the real world. “Lucky for all of us that I have,” he finally said, pushing his mouth into some sort of smile. “Otherwise, I’d have to fight you for her.” Here’s that old euphony again, he thought: Neela, Mila. Desire is coming after me, and giving me warnings in rhyme.
She worked as a producer with one of the better independents, and specialized in documentary programming for television. Right now she was planning a project that would take her back to her roots. Things back home in Lilliput-Blefuscu were not good, Neela explained. People in the West thought of it as a South Sea paradise, a place for honeymoons and other trysts, but there was trouble brewing. Relations between the Indo-Lilliputians and the indigenous, ethnic “Elbee” community—which still made up a majority of the population, but only just—were deteriorating fast. To highlight the issues, New York representatives of the opposing factions had both arranged to hold parades on the same upcoming Sunday. These manifestations would be small but fervent. The two march routes were to be widely separated, but it was still a good bet that there would be some angry clashes. Neela herself was determined to march. As she talked about the worsening political turbulence in her tiny patch of the antipodes, Professor Solanka saw the hot blood rising in her. This conflict was not a small matter for beautiful Neela. She was still connected to her origins, and Solanka almost envied her for it. Jack Rhinehart was saying, boyishly, “Great! We’ll all go! Sure we will! You’ll march for your people, Malik, right? Well, you’ll march for Neela, anyhow.” Rhinehart’s tone was light: a miscalculation. Solanka saw Neela stiffen and frown. This wasn’t to be treated as a game. “Yes,” Solanka said, looking her in the eyes. “I’ll march.”
They settled down to watch the game. More goals came: six in all for
the Netherlands, a late, irrelevant consolation strike for Yugoslavia. Neela, too, was glad the Dutch had done well. She saw their black players, uncompetitively but also without false modesty, as her near equals in gorgeousness. “The Surinamese,” she said, unknowingly echoing the thoughts of the young Malik Solanka in Amsterdam all those years ago, “are the living proof of the value of mixing up the races. Look at them. Edgar Davids, Kluivert, Rijkaard in the dugout, and, in the good old days, Ruud. The great Gullit. All of them, metegues. Stir all the races together and you get the most beautiful people in the world. I want to go,” she added, to nobody in particular, “soon, to Surinam.” She sprawled across the settee, throwing one long, leather-clad leg over the arm, and dislodged the day’s Post. It fell to the floor at Solanka’s feet, and his eye was caught by the headline: CONCRETE KILLER STRIKES AGAIN. And below, in smaller type: Who Was the Man in the Panama Hat? Everything changed at once; darkness rushed in through the open window, blinding him. His little rush of excitement, good humor, and lust drained away. He felt himself trembling, and rose quickly to his feet. “I have to leave,” he said. “What, the final whistle blows and you’re out of here? Malik, friend, that just plain ain’t polite.” But Solanka only shook his head at Rhinehart and headed out through the door, fast. Behind him he heard Neela talking about the Post headline; she’d picked up the paper as he left. “Bastard. This stuff is supposed to have stopped, it’s supposed to be safe now, right,” she was saying. “But, shit, it’s never over. Here we go again.”
6
“Islam will cleanse this street of godless motherfucker bad drivers,” the taxi driver screamed at a rival motorist. “Islam will purify this whole city of Jew pimp assholes like you and your whore roadhog of a Jew wife too.” All the way up Tenth Avenue the curses continued. “Infidel fucker of your underage sister, the inferno of Allah awaits you and your unholy wreck of a motorcar as well.” “Unclean offspring of a shit-eating pig, try that again and the victorious jihad will crush your balls in its unforgiving fist.” Malik Solanka, listening in to the explosive, village-accented Urdu, was briefly distracted from his own inner turmoil by the driver’s venom. ALI MAJNU said the card. Majnu meant beloved. This particular Beloved looked twenty-five or less, a nice handsome boy, tall and skinny, with a sexy John Travolta quiff, and here he was living in New York, with a steady job; what had so comprehensively gotten his goat?
Solanka silently answered his own question. When one is too young to have accumulated the bruises of one’s own experience, one can choose to put on, like a hair shirt, the sufferings of one’s world. In this case, as the Middle East peace process staggered onward and the outgoing American president, hungry for a breakthrough to buff up his tarnished legacy, was urging Barak and Arafat to a Camp David summit conference, Tenth Avenue was perhaps being blamed for the continued sufferings of Palestine. Beloved Ali was Indian or Pakistani, but, no doubt out of some misguided collectivist spirit of paranoiac pan-Islamic solidarity, he blamed all New York road users for the tribulations of the Muslim world. In between curses, he spoke to his mother’s brother on the radio—“Yes, Uncle. Yes, carefully, of course, Uncle. Yes, the car costs money. No, Uncle. Yes, courteously, always, Uncle, trust me. Yes, best policy. I know”—and also asked Solanka, sheepishly, for directions. It was the boy’s first day at work in the mean streets, and he was scared witless. Solanka, himself in a state of high agitation, treated Beloved gently but did say, as he alighted at Verdi Square, “Maybe a little less of the blue language, okay, Ali Majnu? Tone it down. Some customers might be offended. Even those who don’t understand.”
The boy looked at him blankly. “I, sir? Swearing, sir? When?” This was odd. “All the way,” Solanka explained. At everyone within shouting distance. Motherfucker, Jew, the usual repertoire. Urdu,” he added, in Urdu, to make things clear, “meri madri zaban hai. “Urdu is my mother tongue. Beloved blushed, deeply, the color spreading all the way to his collar line, and met Solanka’s gaze with bewildered, innocent dark eyes. “Sahib, if you heard it, then it must be so. But, sir, you see, I am not aware.” Solanka lost patience, turned to go. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Road rage. You were carried away. It’s not important.” As he walked off along Broadway, Beloved Ali shouted after him, needily, asking to be understood: “It means nothing, sahib. Me, I don’t even go to the mosque. God bless America, okay? It’s just words.”
Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, moving off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change the world. Also, uhhuh, not knowing what you’re doing—separating deeds from the words that define them—was apparently becoming an acceptable excuse. To say “I didn’t mean it” was to erase meaning from your misdeeds, at least in the opinion of the Beloved Alis of the world. Could that be so? Obviously, no. No, it simply could not. Many people would say that even a genuine act of repentance could not atone for a crime, much less this unexplained blankness—an infinitely lesser excuse, a mere assertion of ignorance that wouldn’t even register on any scale of regret. Shockingly, Solanka recognized himself in foolish young Ali Majnu: the vehemence as well as the blanks in the record. He did not, however, excuse himself. At Jack Rhinehart’s apartment, before the poleaxing arrival of Neela Mahendra had changed the subject, he had been attempting, while concealing the depth of his perturbation, to confess to Rhinehart something of his fear about the terrorist anger that kept taking him hostage. Jack, absorbed in the soccer game, nodded absently. “You must know you’ve always had a short fuse,” he said. “I mean, you are aware of that, right? You’re conscious of the number of times you’ve rung people up to apologize the number of times you’ve rung me up—the morning after some little wine-lubricated explosion of yours? The Collected Apologies of Malik Solanka. I always thought that would make a fine book. Repetitive, maybe, but with rich comic delights.”
Some years back, the Solankas had vacationed at the cottage in the Springs with Rhinehart and his “waitress” of the moment, a petite Southern belle—from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, scene of the Civil War’s “Battle Above the Clouds”—who was a dead ringer for the cartoon sexpot Betty Boop and to whom Rhinehart referred affectionately as Roscoe, after Lookout Mountain’s only living celebrity, the heavy-serving tennis player Roscoe Tanner, in spite of her evident hatred of the nickname. The cottage was small and it was necessary to spend as much time as possible away from it. One night after a protracted, men-only drinking session at an East Hampton watering hole, Solanka had insisted on driving back during a heavy downpour. A period of dumbstruck terror ensued. Then Rhinehart said, as mildly as he could, “Malik, in America we drive on the other side of the road.” Solanka had blown up and, incensed at the disrespect being shown to his driving skills, had stopped the car and actually forced Rhinehart to walk home in the drenching rain. “That was one of your best apologies,” Jack now reminded him. “Particularly because the next morning you couldn’t remember doing anything wrong at all.”
“Yes,” Solanka murmured, “but now I’m having the blackouts without the booze. And the anger events are on a completely different scale.” The noise of the TV crowd surged as he spoke, demanding Rhinehart’s attention, and the confession passed unheard. “Oh, and,” Rhinehart resumed moments later, “you can’t not know how hard your friends try to avoid certain subjects in your company. U.S. policy in Central America, for example. U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Actually, the U.S.A. in general has been pretty much an off-limits topic for years, so don’t think I wasn’t tickled when you decided to relocate yo’ ass in the bosom of the Great Satan hisself” Yes, but, Solanka wanted to say, rising to the bait, what’s wrong is wrong, and because of the immense goddamn power of America, the immense fucking seduction of America, those bastards in charge get away with… “There you go, you see,” Rhinehart pointed at him, chuckling. “Just swellin’ up fit to bust. Bright red, then purple, then almost black. A heart attack waiting to happen. You know wha
t we call it when it happens? Getting Solankered. Malik’s China syndrome. It’s an honest to God fuckin’ meltdown. I mean, mah fren’, Ira the man who actually done gone to these places and brought back the bad news, but that don’t stop you from tellin’ me off ‘bout it, on account of my citizenship, which in yo’ mad eyes makes me ‘sponsible for de mighty evil dat keep gettin’ done in mah po’ name.”
No fool like an old fool. So he and Beloved Ali were really the same after all, Solanka humbly thought. Just a few slight surface differences of vocabulary and education. No: he was worse, because Beloved was just a boy on his first day in a new job, while he, Solanka, was becoming something awful and perhaps uncontrollable. The bitter irony was that his old habits of combativeness, this evidently comic intemperateness of his, would blind even his friends to the great change in kind, the hideous deterioration, that was now taking place. This time there really was a wolf coming and nobody, not even Jack, was listening to his cries.
“And furthermore,” Rhinehart caroled gaily, “remember when you ejected, oh, what’s his name from your house for misquoting Philip Larkin? Man! So you’ve been getting snappy with the neighbors? Whoo-ee. Hold the front page.”
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