by Dan Chaon
Everyone was black, that was one thing. She would be conscious of being a white girl, she would be visible in a way that she wasn’t used to, there would be no crowd to vanish into, and she thought of the times that she and her family had driven through the black parts of Youngstown, how it had felt like the people on the street, the people waiting at the bus stops, had lifted their eyes to stare. As if their old four-door sedan were trailing an aura of Caucasian-ness, as if it were lit with phosphorescence. She remembered how her mother would press the automatic lock buttons on the car door, testing and retesting them.
“This is a bad neighborhood, girls,” their mother said, and Lucy had rolled her eyes. How racist, she thought, and made a point of lifting the lock on her own door.
This, of course, was different. It was Africa. It was a third world country, a place of coup attempts and armed uprisings and child soldiers, and she had read the State Department advisory: Americans should avoid crowds and demonstrations, be aware of their surroundings, and use common sense to avoid situations and locations that could be dangerous. Given the strong anti-French sentiment, people of non-African appearance may be specifically targeted for violence.
But she didn’t want to be a coward, either, and so she simply stood, watching as George Orson took off his socks and massaged the ball of his bare foot with his thumb.
“Will they speak English?” she said at last, hesitantly. “At the hair salon? What if they don’t speak English?”
And George Orson looked up at her sternly. “I’m sure they’ll have someone there who speaks English,” he said. “Besides which—Darling, you’ve had three years of high school French, which should be quite sufficient. Do you need me to write some phrases down for you?”
“No,” Lucy said, and she shrugged. “No—I guess I’m … I’m fine,” she said.
But George Orson exhaled irritably. “Listen,” he said. “Lucy,” he said, and she could tell that he was using her true name deliberately, to make a point. “You’re not a kid. You’re an adult. And you’re a very smart person, I’ve always told you that. I saw that about Lucy right away; she was a remarkable young woman.
“And now,” he said. “Now you just need to be a little more assertive. Are you going to spend the rest of your life waiting for someone to tell you what to do, every step of the way? I mean, Jesus Christ, Lucy! You go down to the lobby, you speak English, or you patch together some pidgin French, or you communicate through sign language, and I’ll bet you can manage to get your hair done without someone holding your hand through the process.”
He put up his arms and fell back onto the bed with a private sotto voce huff of frustration, as if there were an audience out there watching them, as if there were someone else he was commiserating with. Can you believe I have to deal with this?
She wished she could think of some icy, cutting retort.
But she couldn’t think of anything. Speechless: to be talked to in this way, after all of his lies and evasions, after all that time she spent in the Lighthouse Motel, waiting patiently and faithfully, to hear now that she wasn’t “assertive”?
“I need a drink,” George Orson murmured moodily, and Lucy just stood there, gazing down at him. Then, at last, she turned back to her book, to Bleak House, sitting down as with a sweater she was knitting and slowly unfastening the taped bills, observing as the transparent adhesive pulled the letters off of the old pages.
So she would be assertive, she thought.
She was a world traveler, after all. In the past week, she had been to two continents—albeit only a few hours in Europe, in Brussels—but soon she would be living in Rome. She was going to be cosmopolitan, wasn’t that what George Orson had told her, all those months ago, as they drove away from Pompey, Ohio? Wasn’t that what she had dreamed of?
This was not exactly Monaco or the Bahamas or one of the Mexican resorts on the Riviera Maya she used to swoon over on the Internet. But he was right, she thought. It was an opportunity for her to be an adult.
So when he left that morning, promising that he’d be back before noon, she’d steeled herself.
She dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, an outfit that, while not exactly mature, was at least neutral. She brushed out her hair, and found the tube of lipstick she’d bought back when they were driving cross-country in the Maserati. There it was, barely used, still in a zippered pocket of her purse.
She put five hundred dollars into her purse as well, and the rest of the money she wrapped in a dirty T-shirt at the bottom of the cheap, girly Brooke Fremden backpack George Orson had bought her back in Nebraska.
Okay, she thought. She was doing this.
And she boarded the elevator, coolly and confidently, and when a man entered on the next floor—a soldier, in camouflage and a blue beret, red epaulets on his shoulders—she kept her face entirely expressionless, as if she hadn’t even noticed, as if she weren’t aware that he was gazing at her with steadfast disapproval and there was a pistol holstered at his waist.
She rode down all the rest of the way, alone with him in silence, and when he held the elevator door and made a gentlemanly gesture—ladies first—she murmured “Merci,” and stepped into the lobby.
She was really doing this, she thought.
It took a long time to get her hair done, but it was actually easier than she’d thought. She was frightened when she first went into the salon, which was empty except for the two employees—a thin, haughty, Mediterranean-looking woman, who looked as if she were examining Lucy’s T-shirt and jeans with revulsion; and an African woman who regarded her more mildly.
“Excusez-moi,”Lucy said, stiffly. “Parlez-vous anglais?”
She was aware of how clumsy she sounded, even though she enunciated as best she could. She remembered how, back in high school French, Mme Fournier would grimace with pity as Lucy tried to bumble her way through a conversational prompt. “Oh!” Mme Fournier would say. “Ça fait mal aux oreilles!”
But Lucy could say a simple phrase, couldn’t she? It wasn’t that hard, was it? She could make herself understood.
And it was okay. The African woman nodded at her politely. “Yes, mademoiselle,” she said. “I speak English.”
The woman was actually quite friendly. Though she tsked over the dye in Lucy’s hair—“terrible,” she murmured—she nevertheless believed she could do something with it. “I will do my best for you,” she told Lucy.
The woman’s name was Stephanie, and she was from Ghana, she said, though she had lived in Côte d’Ivoire for many years now. “Ghana is an English-speaking country. That is my native language,” Stephanie said. “So it’s pleasant to speak English sometimes. That’s one characteristic with the Ivorians I don’t understand. They turn to laugh at a foreigner who makes a mistake in French, so even when they know a little English, they refuse to speak. Why? Because they think the Anglophones will laugh at them in turn!” And she lowered her voice as she began to work her rubber-gloved fingers through Lucy’s hair. “That is the problem with Zaina. My coworker. She has a good heart, but she is a Lebanese, and they are very proud. All the time, they are worried about their dignity.”
“Yes,” Lucy said, and she closed her eyes. How long it had been since she had talked to anyone besides George Orson! It had been—what?—months and months, and she almost hadn’t realized until just now how lonely she had been. She’d never had many friends, she’d never particularly liked the company of other girls at her high school, but now, as Stephanie’s fingernails drew soft lines across her scalp, she saw that this had been a mistake. She had been like Zaina—too proud, too concerned with her own dignity.
“I’m so happy to see that tourists are coming back to Abidjan,” Stephanie was telling her. “After the war, after all the French fled, the other countries would all say, ‘Do not travel to Côte d’Ivoire, it is too dangerous,’ and it made me sad. Once, Abidjan was known as the Paris of West Africa. Did you know that? This hotel, if you could have seen it fifteen years
ago, when I first came to this country! There was a casino. An ice-skating rink, the only one in West Africa! The hotel was a jewel, and then it began to fall into disrepair. Did you see that once there was a pool that surrounded the whole building, a beautiful pool, but now there is no water in it. For a while, I would come to work and there were so few guests that I imagined that I was in an old, empty castle, in some cold country.
“But things are getting better again,” Stephanie said, and her voice was mild and hopeful. “Since the peace accord, we are returning to our old selves, and it makes me happy. To meet a young woman such as you in this hotel, that’s a good sign. I will tell you a secret. I love the art of coiffure. And it is an art, I think. I feel that it is, and if you like what I do with your hair, you should tell your friends: ‘Go to Abidjan, go to the Hotel Ivoire, visit Stephanie!’”
Later, when she tried to tell George Orson the story of Stephanie, she found it difficult to explain.
“You look remarkable,” George Orson said. “That’s a fantastic haircut,” he said, and it was. The blond was surprisingly natural-looking, not the fluorescent peroxide color she had feared; it hung straight, cut blunt above her shoulder, with just a little wave to it.
But it was more than that, though she wasn’t sure how to articulate it. That dreamy sense of transformation; the intense sisterly intimacy as Stephanie had leaned over her, serenely talking, telling her stories. It was what it must feel like to be hypnotized, she thought. Or like being baptized, maybe.
Not that she could say this to George Orson. It would be too overwrought, too extreme. And so she just shrugged, and showed him the clothes she’d bought at the boutique in the hotel mall.
A simple black dress with thin straps. A dark blue silk blouse, lower cut than she’d usually buy for herself, and white pants, and a colorful African-print scarf.
“I spent a lot of money,” she said, but George Orson only smiled—that private, conspiratorial smile he used to give her when they first left Ohio, which she hadn’t seen in a long time.
“As long as it’s not more than three or four million,” he said, and it was such a relief to hear him joke again that she laughed even though it wasn’t very funny, and she posed flirtatiously, standing up against the bare off-white wall as he took her picture for the new passport.
He thought he could get them new passports within twenty-four hours.
He was drinking more, and it made her uncomfortable. More than likely he had been a drinker all along, sequestered in his study in the old house above the Lighthouse Motel, slipping heavily into bed beside her in the middle of the night, smelling of mouthwash and soap and cologne.
But this was different. Now that they were sharing a single room, she was more aware of it. She watched him as he sat at the narrow hotel room writing desk, scrutinizing the screen of his laptop, typing and surfing, typing and surfing, taking gulps from his tumbler. The bottle of Jameson whiskey he’d gotten from room service was almost empty, after only two days.
Meanwhile, she lay in bed, watching American movies that had been dubbed into French, or reading through Marjorie Morningstar, which had survived the removal of the taped bills better than Bleak House had.
They’d had a moment, when he’d seen her new haircut and clothes, a brief return to the couple she’d imagined they were, but it lasted only a few hours. Now he was distant again.
“George?” she said. And then when he didn’t answer: “Dad …?”
This made him wince.
Drunk.
“Poor Ryan,” he said cryptically, and he lifted his glass to his lips, shaking his head. “I’m not going to screw up this time, Lucy,” he said. “Trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
Did she trust him?
Even now, after everything, did she believe that he knew what he was doing?
These were still difficult questions to answer, though it helped to know that she was carrying around a backpack that contained almost a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
It helped that they were no longer in Nebraska, that she was no longer a virtual prisoner in the Lighthouse Motel. When he left the next morning on one of his errands, she was free to wander if she wished, she could ride the elevator down to the lobby of the hotel. She carried the backpack with her, strolling through the corridors and shopping boutiques in her new clothes, trying to think. Trying to imagine herself forward just a few days. Rome. 4.3 million dollars. A new name, a new life, maybe the one that she’d been expecting.
The hotel was a massive complex, but surprisingly quiet. She had expected the lobby to be crowded with people, like the throngs that had rushed along the terminals of the airports in Denver and New York and Brussels, but instead it was more like a museum.
She moved dreamily through a long lobby. Here on the wall was a stylized long-faced African mask—a gazelle, she guessed—with the horns curving down like a woman’s hair. She saw two African women, in bright orange and green batik, strolling peaceably; and a hotel employee gently shepherding a bit of litter into his long-handled dustpan; and then she passed outside into an open-air promenade, with tropical gardens along one side, and graceful botanically shaped abstract statues, and a colorful obelisk, decorated with shapes and figures almost like a totem pole; and then the promenade opened up, and there was a cement bridge that led across turquoise pools to a small green island, from which you could look across the lagoon toward the skyscrapers of Abidjan.
Wondrous. She was standing on a path lined with globed streetlamps, under a cloudless sky, and this was probably the most surreal thing that had ever happened to her.
Who, back in Ohio, would have ever believed that Lucy Lattimore would one day be standing on a different continent, at the edge of such a beautiful hotel? In Africa. With an elegant haircut and expensive shoes and a light, fashionable white pleated dress, with the hem lightly moving in the breeze.
If only her mother could see her. Or that horrible, sneering Toddzilla.
If only someone would come along to take her photograph.
At last, she turned and walked back through the gardens again, back toward the center of the hotel. She found her boutique, and bought another dress—emerald green, this time, batik-printed like the outfits of the women she’d seen in the hallway—and then with her shopping bag she found her way to a restaurant.
Le Pavillion was a long, simple room that opened into a patio, almost entirely empty. It was past lunchtime, she supposed, though there were still a few patrons lingering, and as the maître d’ led her to her place, a trio of white men in flowered Hawaiian shirts looked up as she was led past.
“Beautiful girl,” said one of them, bald, arching his eyebrows. “Hey, girl,” he said. “I like you. I want to be your friend.” And then he spoke to his cohorts in Russian or whatever, and they all laughed.
She ignored them. She wasn’t going to let them ruin her afternoon, though they continued to talk raucously even as she held her menu up like a mask.
“I am good lover,” called the one with spiked dyed orange hair. “Baby. We should meet us.”
Assholes. She gazed at the words on the menu—which were, she realized, entirely in French.
When she came back to the room, George Orson was waiting for her.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he said as she opened the door.
Furious.
She stood there, with the backpack full of their money, and a tote bag from the boutique, and he winged a projectile at her—a little booklet, which she deflected with an upraised hand. It hit her palm, and bounced harmlessly to the floor.
“There’s your new passport,” he said bitterly, and she stared at him for a long time before she bent to pick it up.
“Where have you been?” he said as she stoically opened the passport and looked inside. Here was the photo he’d taken yesterday—with her brand-new hairdo—and a new name: Kelli Gavin, age twenty-four, of Easthampton, Massachusetts.
She didn’t say anything.
“I thought you were … kidnapped or something,” George Orson said. “I was sitting here, thinking: What am I going to do now? Jesus, Lucy, I thought you left me here.”
“I was having lunch,” Lucy said. “I just went downstairs for a minute. I mean, weren’t you just complaining that I wasn’t assertive enough? I was just—”
He cleared his throat, and for a second she thought he might be about to cry. His hands were shaking, and he had a bleak look on his face.
“God!” he said. “Why do I always do this to myself? All I ever wanted was to have one person, just one person, and it’s never right. It’s never right.”
Lucy stood there looking at him, her heart quickening, watching uncertainly as he lowered himself into a chair. “What are you talking about?” she said, and she supposed that she should speak to him gently, apologetically, soothingly. She should go over to him and hug him or kiss his forehead or stroke his hair. But instead she just regarded him as he hunched there like a moody thirteen-year-old boy. She tucked her new passport into her purse.
She was the one who should be frightened, after all. She was the one who ought to need comfort and reassurance. She was the one who had been tricked into falling in love with a person who wasn’t even real.
“What are you talking about?” she said again. “Did you get the money?”
He peered down at his hands, which were still quivering, making spasms against his knees. He shook his head.
“We’re having negotiating problems,” George Orson said, and his voice was smaller, the mumbling agitated whisper he’d get when he woke up with his nightmares.
Not like George Orson at all.
“We may have to give up a much larger cut than I expected,” he said. “Much larger. That’s the problem, it’s all corruption, everywhere you go in the world, that’s the worst part of it—”
He lifted his head, and there was hardly a trace of the handsome, charming teacher she’d once known.
“I just want one person I can trust,” he said, and his eyes rested on her accusingly, as if somehow she had betrayed him. As if she were the liar.