by Mbue, Imbolo
“I can tell her, sir? Do you want me, sir … you want me to—”
“You can answer her questions.”
“You mean I can tell her everything, sir?”
“Of course you can tell her everything. Where do you take me to that you can’t talk about? Who do you see me with?”
“That is what I told her, sir. I told her I only take you to office buildings in midtown and downtown and sometimes—”
“Never mention Chelsea.”
“I have never mentioned Chelsea, sir. I will never.”
The car was silent for a minute, the men acknowledging without words what they each knew the other knew. Jende wanted Clark to know more; he wanted to assure him of his loyalty, promise him again that his secret would always be safe. He wanted to tell Mr. Edwards that because he had given him a good job that had changed his life and that was enabling him to take care of his family, send his wife to school, send his father-in-law a cash gift every few months, replace the roof and crumbling wooden walls of his parents’ house, and save for the future, he would always protect him every way he could.
He did not say it, but Clark Edwards said “Thank you” nonetheless.
The perspiration running down Jende’s back dried off. “Thank you so much, sir, for understanding,” he said. “I was not sleeping well. Not knowing what to do. I am glad I can make both you and Mrs. Edwards happy.”
“Of course.”
“I was so afraid I would lose my job if I did not do the right thing.”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. Your job is secure. You’ve been excellent. Continue doing as I ask you to do, and you won’t have to worry about anything.”
Both men were silent again as the car crawled through the midtown madness of tourist shoppers and harried commuters and street vendors and city buses and tour buses and yellow cabs and black cars and children in strollers and messengers on bikes, and too much of everything.
“Sir,” Jende said, “is Mrs. Edwards doing well?”
“Yeah, she’s fine. Why?”
“It looked to me, sir, as if—”
Clark’s phone buzzed and he picked it up. “Did you talk to Cindy?” he said to the person on the line. “Great … I think she’s putting you guys at the Mandarin Oriental, not sure why … No, it’s fine, if that’s what everyone prefers.” He listened for a while and then laughed. “Sounds like Mom,” he said. “And Dad’s visit to New York is never complete without a Central Park walk … Yeah, I’ll make sure Jende is available to pick everyone up from the airport … Me, too, I’m excited; it’s going to be great … I can’t remember the last time, either. Maybe the year Mighty and Keila were born and no one was in the mood to deal with the holiday crowd with babies? … Don’t worry about bringing anything, and tell Mom not to. Cindy and June are taking care of everything. They’ve got their menu down … I don’t think they need help; they’ve been doing it for years … Oh, okay … Go ahead then. I didn’t know you’d already suggested it to her. I’m glad everyone’s on the same page … Listen, Cec, I’ve got to go … Sounds good.
“Sorry about that,” Clark said to Jende after hanging up. “We’re very excited about being together in New York for the first time in so many years.”
“I understand the excitement, sir.”
“You were saying something about Cindy?”
“Yes, sir,” Jende replied. “I was just saying, sir, I don’t know if it is the right thing for me to say, but it looked to me like she has lost some weight, so I just wanted to make sure that she is fine. I will be glad to do whatever is needed if she is not well and … if you need me to help around the house, sir.”
“That won’t be necessary, but thank you. She’s doing very well.”
“I am glad to hear that, sir, because I was a bit worried—”
“The recession is hard on us all, but she’s doing good.”
“By the grace of God, sir, we will all be okay soon.”
Clark picked up the Wall Street Journal lying next to him. After a few minutes of reading it, he lifted up his head and looked at Jende. “You should tell her that she lost weight,” he said. “She’ll be glad to hear that.”
Jende smiled. “Maybe I will, sir,” he replied. “Mrs. Edwards is a good woman.”
“Yeah,” Clark said, returning to his newspaper. “She’s a good woman.”
Thirty-two
TWICE A DAY, DURING HIS LUNCH BREAK AND BEFORE PARKING THE CAR FOR the day, he wrote down everything he thought Cindy would love to read: benign information, banal rundowns. He provided details that were far from necessary; included times, locations, and names that served no purpose; added descriptions of people whose actions and behaviors contributed nothing to the narrative. This was his first chance to write something on a daily basis since his student days at National Comprehensive, so he took the opportunity to employ phrases and expressions he hadn’t found a way to use in everyday conversation; throw in words he’d learned from reading the dictionary he’d owned since secondary school; display sentences and tenses he’d picked up from the newspaper and which he hoped would be proof to the madam that he was thinking carefully as he wrote.
On a Tuesday afternoon, he wrote:
Pick Mr. Edwards up at 7:05, but the slow traffic discombobulated Mr. Edwards because he has meeting at 7:45. Drop Mr. Edwards at work at 7:42. Before when we were still in the car, he call his new secretary (I continue to forget her name) and tell her he was going to be late. When I drop him in front of the office, a black woman wearing a suit is outside. It looks like she just comes out of a car too. I see her and Mr. Edwards say hi to one another and then walk into the office together. I have seen this woman before. My brain cells fire around all day and I remember where I saw her. She used to work at Lehman too. It is 2:30 now and I have not seen Mr. Edwards because he demarcate this whole time to be in the office.
On a Friday evening, after driving Clark from the Chelsea Hotel to the office, he wrote:
At 4:00 Mr. Edwards and I leave Washington, D.C. He gets plenty of phone call but nothing sounds chary and fishy. Everything sounds like work. Someone who he says this to, another person who he says that to. Different work things. I do not talk to him all the way back for fear of uttering disturbances to him. When we return to the city, it is after 8:00. I drive him to his gym. He gets out of the gym at 10:00 and then I drive him to work.
As often as he could, he put the gym in place of the Chelsea Hotel, but in the weeks when Clark went to the hotel more than twice, he concocted other reasons, something novel every week. One evening, fearing that Cindy might have tried to reach Clark while he was in the hotel, he wrote about being stuck in bad traffic in the Holland Tunnel, which has “staggeringly deficient phone reception.” Another time he wrote that Clark had to hurry to a meeting, “so he jumped quickly into a yellow taxi when I was on my way back from picking up Mighty so I have no way that is indisputably solid to know where he was going to or who he was seeing. But I am unequivocal in my believe that he was going to a very crucial meeting.”
He carried the blue notebook with him at all working hours, and presented it to Cindy every morning so she could read it on her way to work. Sometimes she appeared to read every detail, nodding and referencing previous pages. Always, she gave it back to him with no comment besides a quick thanks and a reminder to keep writing.
“I will continue writing, madam,” he always said as he held the door open for her to step out of the car. “Have a great day, madam.”
And her days did seem to be getting great, right from around when he began submitting the entries to her.
Phone calls with her friends were no longer peppered with teary whispers about “what he’s doing to me” and doubts about “how much longer I can go on like this.” She was laughing a little more, and by the time Jende gave her three weeks’ worth of entries, she was laughing a lot more, and louder. Her looks did not return to where they’d been the year before (her skin, though still supple-look
ing, had lost some of its glow, and her collarbones were sticking out even higher), and she did not stop talking about Vince, worrying that he hadn’t responded to her email in three days, but she found reasons to smile, like the fact that June and Mike had reconciled, and she and Mighty and Clark were going to St. Barths for Christmas. It should be a wonderful time, she told her friends, and Jende fervently wished so, too, because after months of hearing her groan and sigh, and watching her rest her head against the window with her hand on her cheek and her eyes on the blissful world outside, shake her head, and dejectedly say, whatever, Clark, do whatever you want; after seeing too much of the persistent pain she concealed so splendidly when she wasn’t around her family and closest friends, he very badly wanted the madam to have a wonderful time.
Which was what she seemed to have had when she and Clark attended a gala at the Waldorf Astoria the Monday after Thanksgiving.
Clark’s parents had come for the holiday, along with his sister and nieces, and days later, Mighty had told Jende what an awesome Thanksgiving his family had had. They had celebrated it with June’s family, as they always did (the two families alternated hosting duties every year), and his mother and grandmother and aunt had cooked and baked all day, laughing and telling stories in the kitchen. It was the first Thanksgiving his dad’s family had spent together in forever, because with his grandparents in California and his aunt and cousins in Seattle, it had been hard to get everyone together, considering work schedules and his dad and aunt’s shared hatred of holiday travel. But this year everyone said they had to do it, and it had been so much fun. Jende was surprised to learn that Cindy and her mother-in-law loved each other, because in Limbe mothers-in-law were often the reason wives stayed up at night crying, but Mighty had told him that no, his mom called his grandparents “Mom and Dad” and always made sure to phone them at least once a month as well as on their birthdays and wedding anniversary. She always insisted Mighty and Vince do the same, and whenever they forgot, she scolded them and reminded them that family was everything.
Indeed, Jende could see in Cindy’s new joy, days after Thanksgiving, that the security of family was her greatest source of happiness. Thanks to this rediscovered bliss, hers was no longer a marriage limping from day to day but one skipping and kicking up its heels and waltzing from evening to evening to Johann Strauss’s “Voices of Spring.”
On the day of the Waldorf Astoria gala, she and Clark entered the car beaming, the happiest Jende had ever seen them, apart or together, in over a year of working for them. Maybe the notebook entries had blown her fears away, Jende thought, assured her that her husband was a good man. Or perhaps the family reunion had reminded her of everything worth fighting for. Or perhaps it was due to something else that had happened between her and her husband, something Jende had no way of knowing. Whatever it was, it was more than sufficient to turn them into young lovers, whispering and giggling on the ride to the gala: she, lustrous in a red strapless trumpet gown; he, youthful and suave in a perfect-fitting tuxedo. They reentered the car five hours later in even greater merriment, laughing about things that had transpired on the dance floor.
“I never thought the day would come when I would see Mr. and Mrs. Edwards happy like that,” Jende said to Neni when he got home after midnight.
“Were they kissing and doing all kinds of things in the backseat?” Neni asked as she placed his dinner on the table.
“No, God forbid. I would have had an accident in one minute if I’d seen that. They were only leaning against each other and speaking into each other’s ears and she was laughing very loud at everything he was saying. He was playing with her hair … Anyway, I didn’t want to look too much, but the whole thing was really shocking me.”
“I wonder what happened. You think maybe she put a few drops of love potion in his food? The really strong one that makes a man fall for you and treat you like a queen?”
“Ah, Neni!” Jende said, laughing. “American women do not use love potions.”
“That’s what you think?” Neni said, laughing, too. “They use it, oh. They call it lingerie.”
Thirty-three
IT WOULD BE NOTHING BUT A BLIP IN A LONG PERIOD OF ENNUI, A BRIEF reprieve from the agony of putrid unions. Two days after the gala at the Waldorf Astoria, a story would appear in a daily tabloid, and the butterfly their marriage was turning into would morph back into a caterpillar.
It was a story that, in ordinary times, would have been dismissed as rubbish. Because, really, no one with a true sense of the world could be naïve enough to think such things didn’t happen. If there had been no collective desire to find the presumed architects of the financial crisis despicable, few would have cared to read the story. Its regurgitation in newspapers of record and blogs of repute would have been another reminder why the American society as a whole could never call itself highbrow, why the easy availability of stories on the private lives of others was turning adults, who would otherwise be enriching their minds with worthwhile knowledge, into juveniles who needed the satisfaction of knowing that others were more pathetic than them.
But the story, though it first appeared in an ignoble tabloid, was not dismissed. Rather, it was talked about in barbershops and on playground benches, forwarded to neighbors and classmates. It was a time of anguish in New York City, and those who put the story on the front page knew where they wanted the rage of the downtrodden to flow.
“Did you see it?” Leah said to Jende after he had seen her missed call and called her back during his lunch break.
“See what?” Jende asked.
“The story from the prostitute. It’s juicy!”
“Juicy?”
“Poor Clark! I really hope he’s not—”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, Leah.”
“Oh, honey, you obviously haven’t read it,” Leah said excitedly. “Well, you won’t believe it, but this woman, this escort—I hate when they use such fancy words for prostitutes—anyway, she claims she has a lot of clients from Barclays, and, listen to this, her clients are paying for her service with bailout money!”
“Bailout money?”
“Bailout money! Can you believe it?”
Jende shook his head but didn’t reply. The bailout thing was in the news every day, but he still didn’t understand if it was a good thing or a bad thing.
“And you want to hear the crazy part?” Leah went on, her voice getting pitchier in excitement. “One of the executives she mentions as her frequent clients is Clark!”
“No,” Jende immediately said. “It’s not true.”
“She says it right here.”
“It’s not true.”
“How do you know it’s not true?”
“She wrote his name down?”
“No, she only mentions them by title, and I know Clark’s title.”
Jende chuckled to himself. “Ah, Leah,” he said. “You should not believe everything you read in the newspaper. People write all kinds of things—”
“Oh, I believe this one, honey. I know those men, what they do … No one’s going to make me think this is impossible—”
“There is no way it can be true—Mr. Edwards would never use bailout money for his own things. And even if the other men at Barclays use this prostitute, how does she know which pocket the money came out of? Mr. Edwards has his own money. He would never touch government money.”
“Maybe not, but what about touching prostitutes? You think he’s never used one or two or a hundred? I bet you’ve seen him—”
“I’ve never seen anything.”
“Poor Cindy.”
“Poor her for what?”
“For when she reads this. She’s going to go crazy!”
“She is not going to believe any of this,” Jende said, getting upset and wondering if Leah was excited about the downfall of a family or just loving the gossip. “It is funny in this country, how people write lies about other people. It is not right. In my country, we gossip a lo
t, but no one would ever write it down the way they do in America.”
“Oh, Jende,” Leah said, laughing. “You really believe in Clark, huh?”
“I don’t like it when people make up stories about other people,” Jende said, getting increasingly agitated at Leah’s glee. “And how does this woman even know what Mr. Edwards’s title is?”
“Yeah, that’s the one thing that’s funny, right? The madams don’t give the name of the clients to the girls. The girls are just told the time and place to show up and … Please, honey, don’t ask me how I know all this.” Leah laughed at herself. Jende did not join her.
“But Cindy,” Leah went on, “she’s not going to care about any of that. That woman is paranoid to a T, and, let me warn you, she’s going to be asking you lots of questions. She used to pepper me with questions whenever she had a chance, and I had to tell her, ‘Woman, I don’t work for you, you can’t take twenty minutes of my time—’”
“What is she going to ask me?”
“Oh, tons of stuff, honey,” Leah said, and Jende could sense her smiling, perhaps delighting herself with the thought of the entertaining drama that was likely to unfold. “She’s going to ask you if you ever took him to a hotel, if you ever saw one of those bimbos. I’d be really careful if I were you, because—”
“Ah, Leah, please stop worrying yourself for me,” Jende said, forcing himself to sound nonchalant. “If she has any questions, she’ll ask her husband.”
“The poor woman. I’d hate to be in her shoes. Any of their shoes. Now you see why I never bothered getting married?”
Actually, Jende thought, you didn’t get married because no one wanted to marry you, or you didn’t find anyone you loved enough to marry, because no woman with a brain intact will say no to a man she loves if the man wants to marry her. Women enjoy making noise about independence, but every woman, American or not, appreciates a good man. If that wasn’t the case why did so many movies end with a woman smiling because she finally got a man?