When you have money, Al used to say, nothing is too big. That’s the problem with our class. Unlike their class, we can’t find the thing big enough—bigger than us, bigger than we can afford—to want to buy.
But she felt that she had done it. For days, weeks, it lay like a dirty secret in her heart, materializing only in that e-mail of the itinerary. She would have to build it up slowly, drop hints, maybe master a native recipe and cook it on his birthday, leave a trail of maps and tour guides, play indigenous songs, cover their bed in one big flag, learn to say happy birthday in Farsi—tavalodet mubarak, it was easy!—wear a belly dancer’s outfit, hell, wear a veil!
It did wonders for her as well. She felt meaningful again in their partnership. When they held hands it suddenly took on a whole new meaning; when she said her “I love you” she had backing proof for it, bigger than emotion; when they had sex she had to fight not to let tears (of happiness, fear, confusion, excitement, who knows, who cares, she’d blink them all away) burst out—she couldn’t give it away, couldn’t let him know that she had just moved a mountain, had just given him something even God couldn’t: his and partially hers, a homeland.
The words Hamadan, Isfahan, Shiraz danced on his lips—Darius, the Tehran city boy, more than ever missing his country’s country—and he thought about that dry savory breeze, the one that made you think of how, in the old days, they used salt to preserve meats; how nourishing and self-preserving that ancient air felt … he could not resist it anymore. So he punched the letters with his usual hunt-and-peck: Tehran. They spelled it Teheran, he discovered, on GlobalAGoGo.com, but what did it matter? It meant nothing in English; it meant nothing to them.
A student of his who had been there—a tall thin blonde anthropology major named Wendy, who used to stay after class telling him tales of digs in his homeland, in desolate areas apparently so authentic that even he hadn’t heard of them—had once told him it was cheaper to get there than people thought. When the number came up on the computer screen, he was still discouraged. He could do it, but he had to be sure—hell, he could, he could do it! It was a move—a vacation, a trip, an overdue excursion, he had been trying to convince himself, nothing life-changing—that he could actually make happen. If, that is, he was to really make it happen.
Day after day, he selected the “Hold Reservation” option. Sometimes the reservation was a month away, sometimes two, sometimes eight months away. One day he would do it, he told himself. Something would have to get him going. But in the meantime he could breathe easy, if for just a little while longer. After all, it wasn’t selling out. Who the hell would want to go? There had to be only a handful—less, probably—of people on the continent, at the time, lost enough for a move like that to make any sense to.
He was nowhere to be found, she had accepted that. But quite recently, he had been there, alive and well, somewhere in that city, in Brooklyn, in fact, and he had written to her, probably intending to leave it at that, because he didn’t know his sister, did he? Bastard. Lala Adam would get to her brother, there was no doubt about it. It would take the greatest city on earth to eat itself alive for her to feel stumped by him. Brooklyn, get ready.
There were, of course, a few minor obstacles.
“Ma’am, there is no Brooklyn Airport,” the dead-sounding gum-snapping female voice on the other end stated.
“How far is New York?” Lala realized she hadn’t done any additional research. She thought the greatest city would be great enough for them to know what she meant and simply work it out.
“Brooklyn is in New York, ma’am.”
“Fine, New York Airport,” she muttered.
“There are three that we serve, ma’am. LaGuardia, JFK, Newark.”
“That’s fine—I’ll take the New York one.”
“That’s Newark, ma’am. The other two are in Queens, and Newark is in New Jersey.”
“Brooklyn is in New York and New York is in New Jersey. What on earth is happening here, ticket lady?” If this was going to be so difficult she could only imagine her actual arrival. But once they got through the glitches and she heard the prices, she was relieved. It was something even she, an assistant’s assistant, could afford on her barely above minimum wage salary. At worst she would have wasted a small bonus. It was nothing.
When she asked the ticket lady at 1-800-fAIRAIR why it was so cheap, she simply replied, “It’s all promotions these days. The airlines want you to fly. Especially to New York. You know.”
She did. Nobody was going there, she could imagine, but her. Nobody needed to as badly as she did. “You know, my son was there on nine-eleven—and my brother,” she thought to add, so the woman would not be suspicious, so she would understand just a bit of her urgency, what she had invested.
“Oh no, ma’am. Were they in Lower Manhattan?”
It was the era when you could have full conversations about the world with customer service representatives.
After it was done, Lala sat trembling with unease. It would be her first plane flight alone. Her first important plane flight. Her first trip to that great city.
March 19: she had chosen the day their spring break began at the school. No reason to make things more difficult than they had to be. It was just before the beginning of spring, which meant Persian New Year. What a thrill, she imagined, to have her son and brother to celebrate a truly new year.
But Darius. Darius would have no choice but to understand. This was bigger than he was.
She tried to tell herself there were priorities: A) The Quest for Her Invisible Brother. B) Xerxes, and the Larger Significance of Saving Him. True, he was in his own way long-lost—most concretely to her husband, of course, as she’d manage to speak to him once in a while by phone. But it wasn’t much. It was clear to her that he was trying to break himself off from not just Darius, but them. This notion pissed her off so much that she combated it with the extreme optimism required in believing in something much bigger than men and their quibbles; she decided to have faith, faith that he would be their son again, because there was nothing he could do about it. The universe would simply demand it. She recalled thinking on the twentieth anniversary of her parents’ death, that if only she could have her brother back the blow that had come with their loss would once and for all entomb itself, that even the smallest lingering element of family would become her new full family, saving herself from the feeling that she had lost it all, lost every last drop of blood there was. She had decided rifts in families, no matter how permanent and decisive they seemed, had a way of healing by osmosis, by simple domino effect, by plugging in a different factor just slightly removed, by letting one situation rub off on another. Growth and shrinkage and distortions in the threads were a natural part of the fabric. Just as new stepfathers sometimes became real fathers to their unrelated offspring, just as grandmothers could raise children in lieu of mothers, just as adopted children could fill the holes in families—well, there were ways to add and subtract and multiply and divide which could create a new equation. Bobak and Xerxes were both required to keep the equation balanced, she decided. They were gone for a reason, they would be added back for a reason—after all, if Xerxes and Darius had always been a strong duo, providing a solid support system for her, maybe she wouldn’t be running away to find this stranger, her brother; conversely, if her brother had been there all along, maybe she wouldn’t have the phobia about lost men that would fuel her insistence that Darius and Xerxes reunite. So she decided that once she found her brother it would all have to happen, that the scales of the cosmos would demand the balance, that the circle would want to complete itself, that Darius and Xerxes would, like positive and negative ends of a magnet, dart to each other and lock in a never-again-violative embrace. Who knew by what real-life excuses it would actually happen?—once she unearthed her brother, Darius might be so moved that he would join her in New York himself and beg his son’s forgiveness in person; Bobak might preach to Xerxes the merits of everything from letter wr
iting to being-present-for-your-loved-ones and persuade him to approach Darius; both men might envy Lala and Bobak’s blissful reunion and seek to create something beautiful themselves; the goodwill in the air might just gas them all, every one of them, until who knew?—the whole world might be forced into harmony instead of hellfire. All Lala knew was that it would happen because the world had naturally willed it and you could not get in the way of the world’s natural will, the end.
And then there was C) The City. Fine, she could admit it. She tried to keep it there, in that C slot, tell herself none of this had anything to do with wanting so badly sometimes to escape that life in Eden—all the aimless weekend walking to pass the time, all the shit jobs, all the domestic hell, all the old fake complex-friends who didn’t even notice her now, not to mention the husband who was always up to some new disintegration—no, none of it had to entirely do with wanting to see the world, now that the world was on everlasting finale, endangered in a way she hadn’t remembered since the Revolution—and that had been just her world anyway, now it had become theirs—no, it had nothing to really do with the idea of losing her own self, in what she imagined it was like from movies, a place to get lost among those big almost bendable-looking silver buildings that went so high airplanes interrupted them, that loomed over those streets that were chained with an endless traffic of loud yellow cabs that stopped only for black-cocktail-dressed, diamonded and sunglassed and smoking Audrey Hepburns dashing to window-shop at Tiffany’s, where inside the perfect marble halls there were the echoes of an old Old Blue Eyes crooning these something-bond shoes are longing to stray right through the very heart of it, all the way into the midnight as a lit red apple starburst its seed heart on a heavens-puncturing silver needle on top of another too-tall monument, to the cheering of millions, fireworks again and again and other times just plain fire maybe, the city running, feverish, the thrill, the kill—oh, Lala Adam prayed she would, if she should make it anywhere, she could make it there.…
Suzanne could see it now: the two of them holding hands through the bustling chaotic streets of Iran, she just another one of the women covered in a delicate black draping, her man leading the way, maybe with a camera around his neck, bartering with men at stands selling fruits she’d never seen, gems she’d never heard of, their hookah smoke perfuming the polluted air that somehow still allowed for palm trees to triumphantly sprout tall and proud like multibladed green knives into the skin-colored desert sky … the two of them running down cobblestoned streets where foreign automobiles dressed themselves halfheartedly as cabs, whisking locals one way or another, unused to visitors and vacationers, questioning them, wanting to know about their land, the two of them laughing it off, You get the picture, it’s what you think, it’s exactly what you think, or We’re the wrong people to ask, we left that heaven for this hell—who do you think you’re asking, the people who don’t want to be a member of the club that would have them as a member? Or, best yet, Oh, you don’t want to know, better that you don’t know, better that you just dream than know. …
The dreams bowed out as the day arrived. Xerxes woke on his twenty-seventh birthday, covered in his girlfriend’s kisses, to a sweetly whispered, relentlessly practiced “tavalod tavalod tavalodet mubarak!” She wasted no time handing him his gift.
“Oh, thanks, you didn’t have to, of course,” he muttered automatically, rubbing his eyes to attention, amazed at how very awake his usually morning-groggy, seldom-insomniac girlfriend looked. She was glowing, her face perfectly made up, hair done, as if she had been up for hours perfecting herself.
Even the present looked perfect, impeccably wrapped in metallic paper and secured with velvet ribbons. He struggled with the wrapping and he pretended to gasp.
There it was. Then he began laughing and she joined in, too, and for what felt like an eternity they held each other laughing.
“Dang, you’re good!” he exclaimed, kissing her neck. It was something he hadn’t thought of wanting in ages at least, and here it was. It was exactly right.
It, of course, being the I Dream of Jeannie DVD box set, with director and cast interviews and everything! He popped it into his computer immediately.
It was exactly what she had expected—better even—but his reaction calmed her nerves only slightly. She bit her lip and for the next hour or so let him peacefully watch as she pretended to watch along. There was still a cake and there was … the gift, the real one. She was getting nervous. The plan had been to get him in an ideal mood—humor, she would start with his good humor. The cake would be next. He would be feeling tickled and then fed and then … she could bring out the big bang. He wouldn’t even see it coming. It would be a spectacle indeed. But the delay was giving her a stomachache. She wanted it over.
But Xerxes Adam, suddenly feeling comfortable as the birthday boy, decided to assert himself—it was his day, so he might as well act as though it was, enjoy it even, he thought—and so he declared the cake should wait until the evening.
“But what should we do now?” she asked nervously.
“Nothing,” he insisted. More than anything he longed for a nice normal day of nothing. He had the perfect gift, the IDOJ box set that could take them through much of the day; the perfect girlfriend to perhaps have some promising birthday sex with; and then a cake. And then, if all the good luck could sustain itself, sleep.
Suzanne didn’t know how to go with that plan. It wouldn’t fit. She wanted time for them to talk about it—in case he didn’t get it, the big gift—so she could persuade him to see it her way, see the beauty in it, that he could want it, too, and then they could daydream about it together. And then, yes, cake, sex, sleep, fine.
“There’s something else,” she said out of nowhere, when his contented silence grew too much for her, when seeing him all peaceful and lounging and fingering the Barbara Eden silhouette on the DVD case just got to be too much. “Another part to your present, I mean. In some ways, the real present.”
His eyes grew wide. “Oh no! The Account! Has it gone buck wild for me?”
She tried to laugh. “It’s the real present, I’ll just say it. That, the I Dream of Jeannie, was just, you know, a joke.”
He looked hurt for a second.
“I mean, a stocking stuffer,” she quickly fixed, and reached into a little bag that was tucked deep into the wiring of his box spring, producing a little golden envelope.
“You wrote me a check,” he grinned. “You gave me my own Account.”
She was so relieved to see him in such a good mood, going along with it, being agreeable, that suddenly something about him felt irresistible to her, and with that gold envelope in her hands she came over and gave him a particularly passionate kiss—in her head, the kiss said, Agree to come run away with me—that of course got him riled up and led to a session of particularly satisfying yes indeed, birthday sex!—her manic nervousness translating to almost first-timer excitement and his birthday boy confidence giving off an I-deserve-it strut. They were stalling, she thought, as they just lay there as they always did, dazed in the aftermath. She faced the envelope, in her hand that whole time, now sweaty, too, from being pressed up against Xerxes’s back. She bit a corner of it and wondered what to do next.
Xerxes let out a big snore that woke him up. Half asleep, he tried to cover it up with his usual, “Kidding.”
“Right,” she muttered. There was no better time. He had laughed, he had gotten aroused, he was coated in a cozy sleepiness—all pleasure points had been hit. There was no demon who could go from that to …
Suzanne doesn’t like to think about the exact details of what proceeded because if she ever thought about it too hard 1) she would hate herself, 2) she would hate Xerxes, 3) she would be furious at the gift, 4) she would be furious for wanting to go through with it, and 5) she would discover she really was in love in that way that handicapped your ability to question, that made forgive and forget synonymous, that made impossible plans only seem all the more possible when an
chored in the seemingly steady steel of ardor. …
In thinking about it further, she preferred to imagine she deserved it, in a way. She had, after all, killed one of his birthdays.
It had been bad, even worse. But it had just been a slap on the cheek, she told herself. It had just been a “fuck you, how could you.” It had just been a questioning of what sort of fucking position I thought I was in, prying so deeply into his life. Who did I think I was, anyway? I wasn’t even one of them, fully. He hadn’t said the last part, but in her head she imagined he did and she imagined that was the part that had hurt the most.
“Look, consider the issue dropped,” she had told him after it was all over. She knew there was no chance of that happening for her—or for him either. Even with half her face burning, fresh from her boyfriend’s angry mistake, she still had that stubborn hope that he would come around. They just needed some time.
“You just don’t get it,” were the final words he said that night, before they went to sleep after a mostly silent day, Xerxes totally unable to look her in the face, so astronomically sorry did he feel. But he still couldn’t muster the will to let her know he regretted it. He felt violated. If he had had any insecurities about this sudden woman of his—born out of the thin air of tragedy that September, so suddenly, so deeply wedged in his life, without rhyme or reason—here was the confirmation: she would go too far. And so, in return, so had he.
Sons and Other Flammable Objects Page 25