Dreams of Bread and Fire

by Nancy Kricorian

  Every time the orange telephone trilled in her room over the next week Ani hoped it was Van, but he didn’t call. One evening as she was preparing for Sofia Zed’s class she plucked the receiver on the first ring.

  “Where’d you get this phone number?” she asked Asa, her blood spinning in her temples at the sound of his voice.

  “Mrs. Barton gave it to me,” Asa said. “You busy?”

  “I’m reading about tortured love.”

  “You taking a psychology class?’

  “Literature, Asa. Novels are full of it.”

  “I found another one of your notes this morning.”

  Before she had left his apartment in Seattle in August she had hidden slips of paper with lines from poems on them. Ani knew that if she didn’t tell him to stop he would recite the words.

  He began, “‘So much space between us two / We kiss the planets when we kiss—’”

  She interrupted. She knew where it was going and didn’t want to be dragged to the end of the poem. “Don’t, Asa. Don’t read it.”

  “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” Asa asked.

  “Did you have a nice Christmas with May?”

  “I didn’t call to talk about that, Ani. I miss you.”

  The muscles in Ani’s shoulders tensed. She didn’t say anything in response.

  “I still love you, Ani,” Asa said.

  Candlelight flickered in the mirror of an old dresser. She smelled apricot oil and tasted whisky and pot smoke on Asa’s breath. His body was the landscape she had wanted to travel. Oh, no, she thought, I’m backsliding. Then suddenly she jerked herself up. Don’t let him reel you in like a fish on a hook.

  “Can’t talk to you, Asa. Please don’t call again.” Ani laid the receiver in its cradle.

  the mouth is the heart’s interpreter

  Sondage stubbed out his cigarette, indicating that the class was over. As an afterthought he growled, “All of you. Go see Ordet. At the crossroads of the Infinite and the Sublime, the Verb will bring you face-to-face with your soul.”

  Michael, who was seated next to Ani, passed her a note: ­Tomorrow?

  While she liked Michael, she had no interest in coming face-to-face with her soul while elbow to elbow with him in a darkened theater.

  Ani scribbled, Can’t. Maybe the Musée Marmottan next week. She slid the note back to him. Disappointment registered on his face.

  She wished Elena were in Paris. Ani missed her women friends. They used to sit around in the student center café for hours talking about life and books and relationships. Ani now understood that relationship was a euphemism for bad boyfriend. Having Elena to complain to was one of the things that had made life with Asa bearable.

  Ani was weary of boys. Jacques Stein had phoned her to apologize for his behavior at Odile’s party weeks after the event and to ask her out. She had turned him down. She couldn’t take any more strained conversations in French with men she barely knew. And she hadn’t heard from Van in three weeks.

  On the street a man had his arm hooked around his girlfriend’s neck like a shepherd’s crook. The woman’s face was doleful and downtrodden. A man and a woman bickered in the aisle of the department store where Ani was buying lipstick. Asa hated lipstick, especially red, so she chose a color called Rouge Radical. A woman at the next counter was purchasing concealer for a blackened eye.

  That evening Tacey and Le Con were having a loud argument in the master suite. Ani sat at the kitchen table with Sydney as the child ate her supper. The apartment’s solid walls and floors muffled the words, but Sydney’s face was drawn, the muscles in her jaw moving stiffly as she chewed, while the angry tones and the sound of slamming doors filtered down the stairs.

  “Do you think they’re going to get a divorce?” Sydney asked.

  “Oh, Syd, people can argue without getting a divorce.”

  “I think my dad has a new secretary. That’s usually when they yell,” Sydney observed.

  The next day Ani went to a late-afternoon matinee by herself. Shot in black-and-white in an austere landscape, the film was a drama about a gentleman farmer and his three grown sons. One of the sons, who had gone mad from reading too much Kierkegaard, believed he was the Son of God. A beatific ­daughter-in-law died during a gruesome childbirth scene. In the film’s closing moments, the lost son returned and, in a Christlike gesture, commanded the woman to rise from the dead. Her eyes fluttered open.

  Tears slipping down her face, Ani wanted to shout at the screen, It’s not fair! You can’t bring her back to life. The dead stay dead. And the dead are good for nothing.

  The lights went up. The moviegoers spilled onto the bustling street, where Ani became a faceless exile. She had wanted to free herself from old attachments—her family, the old house, the forsythia in the garden, and the familiar streets—but now she was a pale shadow sliding through the apparent world. The connections she had wrought in her new life had proved to be frail. She saw herself dangling like a spider dropped from the ceiling on a fine filament. It reminded her of seeing Asa rappel down a cliff face on his rope—it was a sturdy rope, after all, but from afar it appeared as barely a scarlet thread.

  She stared down at her small reflection in the night-lit water gliding under the bridge. No matter how they looped around, her thoughts always seemed to come back to Asa. What would become of her now that he was no longer the center of her world?

  What will become of us, Ani? What will we do?

  That’s what Violet Silver had said after the news of her husband’s death was relayed over the telephone. Ani was four at the time and she was scared to see her mother crying, the tears spilling out of Violet as though she were cracking apart like a leaky dam. Ani had started to cry as well, not because her father had died—it would take months for her to grasp what that meant—but because she felt like a leaf caught in the flood of her mother’s grief.

  Her mother had left Ani with a neighbor named Mrs. Donnelly who had white hair and a stiff-legged miniature poodle. The woman’s living room was filled with glass figurines and crystal knickknacks. Ani’s feet, in their white anklets and red patent- leather shoes, stuck out from the sofa cushion. It was summer. The fat white poodle sat panting next to Ani on the couch, its pink tongue hanging out. Mrs. Donnelly, who brought out a tray of lemonade and cookies, gave Ani sidelong glances that were filled with pity.

  Over the next days Ani’s mother came and went, leaving her with a baby-sitter, a college girl with pink lipstick whose name was Cindy. In the evening Violet clutched the telephone to her ear and talked Armenian to her parents. There must have been a funeral, but Ani wasn’t invited. Her mother came home with an urn full of ashes—all that was left of David Silver. Baba and Grandma arrived in New York with a borrowed truck that they loaded with the Silvers’ belongings. On the drive to Watertown, Ani had accompanied her grandfather in the truck. Violet and her mother had followed in the car.

  Ani’s father had whistled songs through his teeth; he had smelled like Old Spice aftershave and new pennies. He had taken her by bus to Central Park, where he bought her an orange balloon and ten tickets for the carousel. When she fell down on the sidewalk and scraped her knee he had held a clean white handkerchief to the spot until it stopped hurting.

  That wasn’t a hell of a lot of things to remember about your father.

  The summer Ani was twelve, she and her mother had spent two weeks in a borrowed house on Cape Cod. One night as Ani lay in bed listening to the sea unfurling itself over the shore she heard jazz coming from the stereo below. She descended to the ground floor, where the orange tip of a lit cigarette was reflected in the sliding glass door. For a second Ani thought the shadowed woman in the wing chair was a stranger who had slipped into the house.

  Mom! You smoke? Ani finally asked.

  Violet switched on the table lamp beside h
er. I used to. This is the first one I’ve had in seven years. Watch this, Violet instructed. She made an O of her mouth and blew out a series of smoke rings that spiraled above her head.

  That’s cool, Ani said admiringly. But isn’t it bad for you?

  Vhy babum! Filt in God’s temple! Violet said, imitating her mother. Once in seven years even God will forgive. Don’t say anything about it, Ani, okay? It’s our secret.

  Ani sat in the other wing chair, tucking her feet under her tailor style. How did you meet Daddy? she asked her mother.

  A smile played at the edges of Violet’s mouth. I haven’t told you that story?

  No, Ani said. Violet hadn’t told her many stories about her father at all.

  Violet said, When I was in college, I used to go to a coffee shop on Broadway in the midafternoon to have tea and biscuits. It was a slow time of day, so I’d sit there at the far end of the counter and do my reading. One day this boy sat on the stool next to me. I felt him staring at me, but I kept reading. When he came back the next afternoon I knew it wasn’t a coincidence. On the third day he said, Excuse me, miss. I know this is forward, but I’d like to introduce myself. That was your dad. He had this sharp way of looking at things. He was full of jokes and funny expressions.

  We sat on those stools talking until it was dinner. Neither of us had much money, so we ordered soup and crackers. When we were leaving the coffee shop it had started raining. I had no umbrella so we shared his. One of its ribs was broken. I was nervous to walk too close to him, so one side of my skirt was wet by the time we reached the campus. He saw that I was cold and took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders.

  Violet gazed past Ani toward the sea, where nothing and every­thing could be seen on the night’s black screen.

  Was he an orphan? Ani asked. She assumed he had been without family, since they had no contact with any Silvers.

  He had a big family—two brothers and sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

  Why don’t we know them?

  Well, Violet said slowly, as though measuring her words, his parents were very religious, and when he married me they disowned him.

  How do you disown somebody? Ani asked.

  They held a kind of funeral service for him, as though he had died, she explained.

  Did they know about the accident?

  His sister sent him a note once a year on his birthday, so I knew her address and found her phone number. I called her before we left New York.

  Do you miss him? Ani asked.

  Violet stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. All the time, sweetie.

  True nostalgia—nostalgos, as the Greeks called it—is an aching in the heart for the homeland because you know what the homeland is and what it isn’t.

  After one of her college professors said this, Ani carried the sentence around with her like a talisman without understanding why it resonated so strongly. Now she wondered what the object of her heartache was. It wasn’t Van’s idea of homeland but rather some more intimate place of rest and comfort. She had imagined the longing was for Asa, but maybe he was only a surrogate for some deeper loss.

  She was lonely here in Paris. But hadn’t she chosen this foreign place, far away and unlike anything she might call home?

  As she crossed the street, Ani followed a schoolboy wearing a bulky leather satchel who was holding his glamorous mother’s gloved hand. A teenager on his scooter buzzed along the edge of the gutter past stalled traffic. In the cheese shop the fromager had arrayed his odorous wares on hundred-year-old marble counters. The primeur had labeled the fruit and vegetables with small yellow signs bearing their names and prices. Ani repeated the words pomme de terre and pamplemousse. She liked the way this other language made her own feel strange and new. She loved that streets were named for writers and that the mail came twice a day.

  Shutting herself in her attic room, Ani found the silence comforting. She believed herself capable of a month-long confinement in one of those whitewashed rooms in a Zen retreat. The steady pulse in her neck would be company enough. She wasn’t waiting for the scrape of a key in the lock. In fact, she had thrown the extra key away.

  As she settled down to her reading for the following week’s classes, the phone rang. It was Odile, inviting her to a family friend’s art opening on the rue Jacob. Would she be at George’s modern class in the afternoon? Of course. It rang again: Michael about the museum date. The next call was from an American whom Ani had met in Sofia Zed’s class. She wanted to borrow Ani’s notes and to tell her about a party a bunch of Yale students were throwing at their apartment on the rue de la Roquette. Did Ani by any chance have any hash connections? Too bad. Bring a bottle then.

  Tacey phoned in a panic because Sydney was running a temperature and would have to be home from school the next morning. Tacey’s schedule was full—a salon appointment and a luncheon at the American Women’s Club—and could Ani possibly cover Sydney through lunch? Ani’s duties and hours had been creeping up without any increase in pay. This latest request was her bargaining chip in negotiations about spring vacation. Ani told Tacey she could baby-sit in the morning and took the opportunity to definitively decline the family trip to Switzerland.

  The phone rang again. Who was left? Ani wondered.

  It was Van. “Sorry I didn’t call sooner. I went out of town for work. I just got back this afternoon.”

  Think fast, Ani. What to say? Lucky you caught me at home. It’s been a real social whirlwind. This is the first night I haven’t gone out in three weeks. It feels like only yesterday that we saw each other. I’ve been waiting by the phone for three weeks, you jerk.

  “Ani, are you there?” he asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” she said.

  “Listen, I’m a couple of blocks away. You want to meet for coffee?”

  “Why don’t you come over here.”

  After Ani hung up the phone she looked down at herself. She was wearing a pair of gray sweats, cut off at the knees and inside out, with an oversized T-shirt and a dance sweater. There were dusty wool socks on her feet. It was an updated version of the faded housecoat and ratty slippers her mother wore when she was down in the dumps. Ani jumped out of the rags and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater.

  As Ani stood in the entrance hall Madame Spinelli, the concierge, opened her door. “May I be of some assistance, mademoiselle?”

  “No, thank you. I’m waiting for a friend.” She hoped the woman would go back inside her curtained door before Van arrived.

  Madame Spinelli glared at Ani suspiciously as she retreated. A moment later Van was standing on the sidewalk grinning at Ani. At the sight of him the underside of her skin contracted with a tingling pinch. When he entered the building Ani put her finger to her lips, gesturing toward Madame Spinelli’s door.

  Ani backed into one corner of the elevator. Van’s presence made the space seem cramped and close. Once they had passed the second floor she explained, “The concierge watches the door like a hawk. I guess that’s part of the job description.”

  In the upstairs hall, Ani pressed the timed light switch and opened the door to her room.

  “Nice place,” Van said. “My chambre de bonne is the size of a closet. I put the chair on the desk so I have floor room for push-ups.” He pulled off his jacket and dropped it over the arm of the couch.

  “You want some tea?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  She filled the electric kettle from the washbasin’s tap.

  “I have my own sink too,” Van said. “Toilet down the hall?”

  “First door on the left. The shower too.”

  “You’ve got a shower? Now that’s what I call luxury. I go to the municipal bath.”

  Ani winced. “Hate to even imagine it.”

  “It’s not so bad. The spray got r
id of the athlete’s foot,” he said, snapping his fingers, “just like that.”

  “And you have a real job. Don’t they pay you?”

  “Don’t feel bad for me. I like living this way. It builds ­character.”

  “But you don’t eat out of Dumpsters.”

  “Why would I do something like that?”

  “I had this friend in college. This guy liked eating out of trash bins, hitchhiking, and panhandling. He used to like sleeping in Salvation Army shelters. A few times when he was bumming around he sold plasma to get money for food.”

  “Let me guess. He had a big trust fund.”

  Ani laughed. “You’re right.”

  “Yes, and I can tell you something else. This friend was actually your boyfriend.”

  The teakettle whistled. Ani poured water over the tea bags in the two mugs. “It’s that obvious, huh?”

  “Let’s just say I recognized the tone.”

  “You mean that bitter, resentful, bitchy tone?”

  Van laughed. “I wouldn’t have put it that way, but I won’t argue with you.”

  Ani sat down across from Van at the round table. He was more talkative than the last time and funnier. His face appeared relaxed and open. She was more at ease with this side of him than with the somber, brooding Van of their long walk home, although that aspect of him was compelling too.

  He put his hands around the warm mug. “I’m going to be working pretty hard in the next few weeks. Have to go out of town a couple of times. Fun isn’t on the current agenda. But I had an idea. I’m taking a vacation in April: Corsica. I’m borrowing a car from a friend. There’s an overnight ferry from Marseille. I have some friends in Bastia.”

  His face tensed as he talked. She wondered where this disjointed narrative was leading.

  He continued. “I was thinking that maybe you might want to, you know, come along, if you can get away.” Here he turned one palm up on the table. It was an unconscious gesture, more candid than anything he was saying.

  The Bartons would be in Switzerland for twelve days, and Jussieu would be shut down for the Easter holiday. There was no reason not to go, except that she wasn’t sure what kind of invitation Van was extending. Was this to be a romantic getaway or a companionable vacation? His face was indecipherable.