“I hate parures,” I said. “I hate rubies.”
He looked baffled. Fashionably overdressed women circumambulated the cases like predators, and the phones kept ringing. When he took a call on his faux antique-gold telephone, I saw my chance. I called over an assistant I’d never seen before, who smoothed down his tie, smiling with deference. I introduced myself.
“Aren’t you the one who helped my husband?”
“Of course —” he said enthusiastically, “that is, Mr. Behroudi spoke to Mr. Tala’afshan and sent Mrs. — I forget the lady’s name —” He stopped.
“Oh, he sent his sister?”
“Mrs. Mazaher! She’s Mr. Behroudi’s sister? I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
I flinched. Pouran Mazaher’s degree of intimacy with my husband was astonishing. She picked out women for him behind my back; now she was picking up jewelry for him. I asked the price of the ring.
“Mrs. Mazaher charged everything to your husband’s account.”
“Everything? She selected the ring —”
“And the gold-and-diamond bracelet! She has excellent taste.”
The owner rushed over, whispered to the assistant, and sent him packing.
“Forgive me, Mrs. Behroudi. He’s new here. How can I be of assistance?”
I told him I wouldn’t be keeping the sapphire ring. Did I wish to select something else? he offered gallantly. I wanted to see the bill.
“There is no bill if you’re returning the ring!”
His assistant could have misinformed me; still, I had to be sure.
“What about the gold-and-diamond bracelet?” I said.
He looked startled but quickly pretended to deliberate about this.
“It must be on the bill,” I said.
“The money isn’t at all important! You’re a valued customer.”
“Please check now,” I said.
He cleared his throat politely, offered tea, Turkish coffee. He went to the back, summoning the errant assistant, then dismissing him and summoning another. They whispered. Evident complications, as I’d suspected. They would try to reach Houshang. Tala’afshan, impersonating the very model of tact and discretion, could not admit to the gold-and-diamond bracelet. He had received instructions not to. He came back, earnest and now amiably perplexed.
“Forgive me. We can’t seem to find the bill. There’s been a misunderstanding. I checked, and nobody knows anything about a gold-and-diamond bracelet. It was a bracelet, you said?”
He was lying. What made it worse was that I disliked him. Houshang had purchased the gift, and Pouran had picked it up. The bracelet was for someone else.
LATE THAT AFTERNOON Mr. Bashirian kept me after a meeting in the conference room, and while other colleagues filed out of the room, he fidgeted, realigning his pens and papers, and I thought, Here we go again. Only the day before, the last person I’d consulted had told me his son could be kept in Komiteh indefinitely and there was nothing he could do at all.
Then the door slammed behind the last person, and Mr. Bashirian quickly whispered, “They called. They’re going to release him!”
“What? That’s incredible news,” I said, astonished.
“I know. I can hardly believe it.”
I felt overcome, overjoyed for him. “When are they releasing him?”
“The next two days. They said they’d call again.”
It was over. Peyman was coming home. But then Mr. Bashirian shifted in his seat, suddenly anxious again, and I thought, He’ll never break the habit, never stop, even when given good news.
“Something they said worries me. They asked if Peyman was on medication.”
“Is he?”
“No, that’s just it. I — I wonder if something’s gone wrong. Why else would they ask? Why ask about medication? I think something’s happened to him.”
“It’s nothing — you’ll see. Just go home and wait for their call.”
When I got home, I was short with Goli, who had given the children dinner a whole hour later than usual. The upstairs was a mess, clothes and plastic guns and toy soldiers strewed about and dinner trays with untouched food still in the study.
The phone kept ringing, and Ehsan and Kamran followed me around, complaining how Mr. Nirvani was their tormentor. They didn’t want a tutor. They didn’t want so much work. Their fingers hurt from writing! “Look, they’re deformed!” they said, curling their fingers before their faces, making horrible grimaces. They hated Ramazan’s dinner. Couldn’t they pop popcorn and gobble candy? Couldn’t they have friends over Thursday and Friday and go to the Ice Palace? Why had I come home so late, and why hadn’t I gone out with their father for dinner? Why did they have to go to bed? They wanted to stay up and watch television like all their friends.
“Enough!” I said.
“You sound just like Mr. Nirvani,” they complained.
I tucked them in. They’d be pulling out flashlights in no time, enacting war games. I went down and called in Golchehreh, addressing her by her full name, as I did whenever I was angry. I explained again about housework and schedules and meals. She complained my sons never listened.
“They’re demons, madame. How did you make them? They were guerrillas again with black shoe polish on their faces, running through pretend jungles. I haven’t enough work? My feet puff up at night and kill me, my back hurts. Ramazan’s worried to death for me. You’re never pleased. I can’t keep up.”
I told her I wanted her to keep to her schedule. She listened, sulking, said that if I was so dissatisfied with her, then she should leave. She threatened every few weeks. I showed her the key to the back door of the kitchen and asked if it was hers or Ramazan’s.
“I don’t know,” she said.
She knew. I had two and they had two. I asked her to go check with Ramazan and waited, leafing through the evening papers until she returned.
“Ramazan must have lost his,” she said sullenly.
“It isn’t lost if it was in the door.”
“Whatever you say,” she said, looking past me.
“One of you came in around eleven-thirty.”
“Who says we did? Swear to God, we didn’t!”
“So who did?”
“I don’t sleep behind the door! How should I know? Don’t you trust us?”
“What’s the matter? Maybe Tourandokht can talk sense to you.”
Goli turned beet red, chewing her lip. I made for the door.
“What does she know?” Goli said about her great-grandmother. “Like she’s got a doctorate or something. Her ideas date from the time of shah-vezvezeh! What does she know about our problems today?”
“What problems?” I said.
Goli shook her head bitterly. “Until when must we swallow our words?”
FRIDAY I TOOK the children to my parents for lunch. I hadn’t seen Houshang in two days.
Mother announced she was worried for her youngest brother, Khodayar, who was finally seeing a specialist after weeks of severe migraines. Of course, she had had to hear this from someone else. “All because of that birdbrained, spiteful wife of his!” she warned us. Father had a cold. He was wearing his gray argyle cardigan from Harrods. Mother was babying him with an iron fist and sarcastic harangues. We lunched at two, listening to Mr. Malekshah, eminent scholar and Platonist. He droned on at the dining table, dividing white rice and eggplant stew on his plate into neat fractions, then spooning them into his mouth. He chewed like a camel. It took forever for him to eat and forever for him to get through Plato’s Republic, enamored as he was with the ideal, with words, with perfection. Father listened intently, always fascinated by his friend, always a gracious listener. Mother tapped the table, making remarkable grimaces at the chandelier.
“Eat, Malekshah, so we can get to dessert!” Mother said.
Mr. Malekshah looked extremely miffed.
“Najibeh, dear,” Father said to her, “these are great thoughts.”
“They disrupt the flow of lunch,
” said Mother.
“But they’re Plato’s!”
“Who says?”
Mother was being particularly contrary, and Father unusually admiring of Plato that day, just to get even. Later in the living room Father confessed he wasn’t about to contradict Mr. Malekshah or Mother or Plato anymore.
“You’ve never liked criticizing anyone to his face,” I said.
Mother came along to give him dagger looks, and whispered, “Can’t you ever do anything, for God’s sake, when that old bore rambles on like that?”
Father watched her formidable back vanish into the kitchen.
“She gets tougher to live with every year,” he said.
He pulled me aside to ask if Reza Nirvani was an effective tutor. When I said, “Of course,” he said he had no doubt. He wanted to know if I’d spoken to him about other things. Was he troubled? Was anything the matter?
“He didn’t give me his life story, if that’s what you mean.”
Father sank into the couch, disappointed.
I went to see Tourandokht in her room, down the hall behind the back staircase, taking a tray of tea and Mother’s almond sohan and two slices of pound cake. She lives on dark tea and sweets. We had a rundown of her aches, the kitchen gossip. The gardener’s sons were rude and uppity and sullen; the new eighteen-year-old maid was infatuated with one of them; the cook, Masht-Ghanbar, who attended the mosque all the time now, was threatening to leave after the scandal about cooking oil. “Of course, we all know your mother tests the patience of a saint!” Tourandokht interjected. I complained about Goli.
“Oh, she’s just impulsive, my dear.”
I said Goli was hostile, lied to my face, listened in on my phone calls, snuck into the house late at night. No, I wasn’t imagining things. Tourandokht shook her head, her white hair and white head scarf a celestial aura. When I left I kissed her, and she stroked my cheek with the abstracted and restful expression of someone anticipating her own vanishing.
In the living room I kissed Father, who was plopped beside a large potted palm listening to Mr. Malekshah. Malekshah was discussing the Neoplatonists, one by one. Father looked drowsy and was blowing his nose.
Mother gritted her teeth by the door. “When is that warthog going to leave your father alone?” she demanded.
She elaborately hugged the children, who ran away, kicking up dead leaves. Then she instructed me to take a nap.
“You look terrible. It’s that pretentious brat you live with!”
This I ignored.
When we got home, the boys went off to play soccer with the neighbor’s children. Thierry called just as I came into the front hall. He wanted to know if I’d forgiven him, if I had it in my heart. It was important to him.
He had a hangover, he had gossip. The night before he’d gone from a cocktail party to the Italian embassy dinner to the Key Club to a late nightcap at someone’s house. Someone high up! The husband was in the Far East on business. Thierry was ascending through Tehran society, cheek to cheek, bed to bed. He yawned. It was so inconvenient — this one was in love with him.
“You love convenience,” I said.
“I prefer you,” he whispered.
He asked to talk to Houshang. I said he wasn’t in, but I felt he already knew that. He asked when Houshang would be home. I had no idea.
“You’re unhappy,” he said.
“You’re impertinent.”
“Don’t be so touchy. I’ve got good news!” he said blithely.
He wanted me to know he’d spoken to the journalist from Paris. The journalist didn’t mention Mr. Bashirian or his son, nor our hostile and ill-fated interview at the Intercontinental. He just said the article was going to be out. It was going to be big, important. Splashed around Europe.
“See how nice we are! Even though your friend threw a tantrum with the typical Eastern touchiness of a porcupine.”
“Stop your typical this and typical that.”
“You’re not typically Iranian,” he said. This, the ultimate compliment from a foreigner.
“I consider that an insult.”
“How typical!” he said, laughing. Then he whispered over the phone, “You know, I could make you happy.”
HOUSHANG CAME in furious. He was running late, he hadn’t eaten all day, he had a splitting headache. He wanted a drink. He wanted to know why I wasn’t ready. I said I wasn’t going, but he said, “Yes you are,” jaw tensed.
“Don’t make a scene,” he cautioned. “Just get ready!”
He disappeared to shower and dress. I longed to have it out with him about the diamond bracelet. For which floozy and mistress was it this time? But hectoring wasn’t punishment. I held my tongue, organized my thoughts.
I wanted him punished.
In the bedroom he carefully combed back his hair, regarding himself in the mirror. I slung on my black satin heels, sitting on the bed, ran fingers up my stockings. Envisioned turning my back on him. Neither of us was sure why we were in the same bedroom that night. We were unacquainted in some immeasurable way. Unlatched. Long before going our separate ways, we had already come unfastened, biding time by going to dinner parties and kissing our children.
He doused on more cologne, more than usual, puckering his full mouth. He slipped on his gold watch, his gold ring with the seal. He was worried. He was aging this autumn. Lines even he couldn’t erase. I sprayed myself with Joy, the perfume I wore by habit. I was becoming like the house I inhabited, by an uninspired and copycat architect — like our life, fixed and entrenched, all the while the underside was decaying.
“I’m tired of Joy,” he said, pulling on his dark jacket.
He had an urgent phone call to make before leaving and went into the study. I sat waiting downstairs in the dark living room.
The orchestra had played by the mountain the night we first met under the trees of the Hotel Darband. We were a party of twenty-four. A long table. Houshang had walked around the table past young women with expectant smiles and asked me to dance. He pulled out my chair, radiant, eyes steady. He handled the chair deftly, turned, put a hand to the small of my back. Rising, going forth, Houshang a step behind me winding through the tables, I looked out to the mountain, the dark trees, the old hotel, the sea of people, and felt the overwhelming reassurance that I was part of this whole, which I belonged to and which belonged to me. A moment of near mystical certainty, moving, eyes to the distance. I took it as a good omen. We stepped up to the dance floor and he took me into his arms and smiled the knowing smile of a man who has eyes for no one else and is at his most potent. Because he sees what he wants. He brushed his lips against my hair and said, “Joy, you wear Joy.” I said I did. He held me closer. Swaying under the enormous canopy of trees, slivered moon, far-flung stars. “You wear it like no other woman,” he said.
I hadn’t wanted to go out that night. My oldest brother, Kavoos, a bachelor then, had taken me by coercion. I’d worn a white sleeve-less dress, turquoise earrings, silver sandals. “And such breeding!” Houshang later said, well before he felt the full burden of its effect. At first I hadn’t even noticed him. Later, I realized he’d been staring, already informed, wily, alert, attuned to what he needed, what it took. The summer nights of Darband were always intoxicating. We danced, returned to the table, and chatted about London. He’d been educated in New York, he was easy to talk to. Until the host asked me to dance. From the dance floor I saw Houshang in the distance, moving around the table — inordinately popular with his short attention span — talking to others. When I got back to my seat, he kept his distance but watched over me, watching the men who sat next to me, who hovered, how long they lingered, maybe for their mistakes. He smoked, mixed pleasure with business, smiled at me from across the table. Took other women away to dance, returned smiling at them as though he’d divined things in them he tolerated but disliked. For a moment I found myself alone at the end of the table. That’s when he looked down the long white table, past the competition and pink and wh
ite carnations and procession of wineglasses and water glasses and crumpled white napkins and abandoned dinner plates. He asked me to dance one more time and escorted me to the dance floor, already possessive. He danced closer, murmuring, laying out his plans. A big house, children, devotion, travel. He had deftness of movement and expression and the well-sedimented contentment of a well-pampered childhood, as well as the peevish edge — the sudden flicker in his eyes, the urgency to domineer coiled like a spring. He asked me about the things I liked, trotting them out like toy soldiers to be inspected. He wanted. Me, success, trinkets. I thought then I wanted what he wanted. “Can I see you again?” he murmured. “Next week, maybe forever?” He handed me to my brother and stood talking to him. I said it was late. In the car my brother said, “He certainly doesn’t waste time.”
There’s something tragic in our age of innocence. And pitiful, how it deserts us suddenly.
A door slammed upstairs. Houshang descended, stood in the front hall adjusting his tie in the mirror. This was the man I would grow old with. This man. I didn’t want to go out to dinner. I wanted to burn a hole in our marriage, pull in the roof.
In the car, neither of us spoke. Houshang slipped in a cassette of Italian music, like the summer evenings of the Hotel Darband. In the backstreets of Zafaranieh, he condemned the divorce of two of our closest friends. She had asked for it, and for the children.
“I believe in marriage,” he said. “For me, there’s no question of divorce. Ever. No question of taking children. It’s barbaric.”
I defended her.
“You defend her because she’s a woman. She should have the mettle to stick it out. She’s selfish.”
He smiled, his gold ring glinting in the dark on the wheel. “When a woman leaves her husband, it’s only because she’s being unfaithful. Because there’s another man.” He looked over at me.
I looked out the window at the walled gardens we were passing. The moon was out, a sliver between huddled clouds. The street a straight and dark incision. The trees phantoms. He wanted to pick an argument with me that I wouldn’t have. He wanted to draw me out. I saw the inky sky, incomparably distant.
In the Walled Gardens Page 21