“Oh, this is Suzanne,” she said nervously, the rude question seeming unmistakably like an Adam, even if it wasn’t, as this was an older man and it couldn’t be, she told herself, it was not possible. …
“You are Xerxes’s …?” he mumbled, suspicion and unease and maybe even accusation, she sensed, deep in his throat.
She said she was. “Who is this?” she tried to ask just in case it was possible, trying hard to say it without sounding rude like … them.
“Oh, hello, this is Darius Adam,” he said, with a hint of cordiality. “Is … is Xerxes home?”
She was relieved that he wasn’t. She couldn’t imagine being found lasting a second on the phone with that bugaboo of a man. “No, no sir,” Suzanne said. “Honestly,” she added, then feeling stupid for having added that because now it all sounded like a lie.
“Oh, I see,” he grumbled, now sounding overtly suspicious. “Well. First, I need to speak to him. Can you let him know?”
She agreed.
“And then, secondly, maybe you can help.” He had suddenly on the spot decided that there was no second to lose, time becomes money, he thought, I must seize the second. So he just simply asked it, “I hear you are going to Tehran?” and the way he pronounced that last word gave her goose bumps, it was so real, so severe, so in its original foreign-land form.
“Uh, yes,” she muttered, amazed at how nervous she sounded, worried that again her truth sounded like a lie. He was an intimidating man—somehow she imagined more eccentricity, extra ludicrousness, a madman, a gong not an anvil—and he seemed to be controlling her every move just by speaking to her from thousands of miles away.
“Well, you see, so am I,” he said, “and I can go anytime. I mean, I was planning to, that is. I wanted to just know when you were all getting there. Perhaps we can travel together.”
Suzanne tried to sound delighted but couldn’t believe herself—there she was, dangling off this stranger’s marionette strings, suddenly dictating their itinerary, giving the dates, the times.
“Stopover in Frankfurt, you say,” he repeated. “Okay … perhaps if nowhere else, I can first meet you there and we can all fly to Tehran together.”
She said in a shaky voice that she would like that very much. She didn’t know if she sounded as if she was lying, or if she really was lying.
“Good, good,” he said. “Well, you have been a help. I need nothing else really. You, in fact, don’t need to tell him I called.”
She agreed.
The idea had occurred to him, he had flirted with finding a way, and then suddenly thanks to his history of ever-reliable absence, there was a way: he could drop a bomb on his son! “Don’t, actually. Let’s just say it can be a surprise.”
She didn’t say anything. Of course, she couldn’t promise it, but he knew enough to not ask for a promise. He had just ordered, demanded—she could do with that what she dared. But she was amazed at how he just assumed she had no idea about their problems. She had no idea how a man could play it so cool. How a man could even be so lucky as to manage not to get the person he really couldn’t speak to anyway.
“In fact, do you have a number?” he suddenly asked.
“A number?”
“Yes, your own phone number, can you give me that, please?” he chuckled. He was downright amused at the awkwardness he inspired, she thought.
She agreed.
“Okay then. Next week it is, huh! Well, I look forward to it and. …” he said, and then added an embarrassingly sincere, “and to meeting you!”
She tried to chuckle, to thank him, but a sound like a moan came out. “You, too,” she croaked. She sensed he was about to hang up and she realized she had to say something, something to safeguard that fucked situation. Surely there was another disaster tucked into all the well-meaning deception. “Look, um, Mr. Adam, I can’t guarantee anything is going to work out. I mean, even us making it there.”
He chuckled, long and heartily, and totally misunderstood. “I have a feeling it’s a different country. I don’t think you’ll be in any danger these days. No, I don’t think we have any fear to worry about … but ourselves!” he laughed.
And before she knew it he was gone, and there she was with yet another potentially relationship-destroying—relationship-challenging? was that a good euphemism?—obstacle. Oh, Iran! Sure, they had nothing to fear when the thing was killing them already. How could Iran itself be the problem when clearly it was everything that came before Iran that they had to really worry about making it through?
I can’t take it anymore and hopefully you can just deal with it and it won’t result again in me taking a blow—I’m sorry, I didn’t want to bring it up again but how could I not—regardless, I have to approach you with it, because we’re not doing surprises anymore, that’s what I learned—and I’ve had butterflies poking holes in my stomach for nearly a month now so I’d rather have it all explode now: Xerxes, your father is coming to Iran, too. So there.
She imagined she’d say it like that, all in one breath, like a cartoon God blowing clouds into storm. He’d have to take it. And then she’d take it. And there, another fight. This time one that she had nothing to do with. Oh, he’d be sorry. And maybe this once she wouldn’t forgive him. She was getting sick of worrying about … everything.
She was imagining it as they sat eating microwave popcorn, ironically enough, in front of the nightly news instead of the VCR, with the newscasters all riled up over some 9/11 black-box voice recording of the terrorists in one of the planes. As they got closer to airing it, she began feeling sicker and sicker. She couldn’t take it. He, on the other hand, he was almost nodding off.
She got up, grabbed the remote, turned off the TV, and snapped, “Enough of this!” As she marched out, needing the vacuumlike solace of her own apartment to soothe her back into unfeeling, she heard a sleepy giggle from Xerxes.
“You sound like my father,” he murmured, amused.
She walked back and just stood there, glaring at him.
He rubbed his eyes and smiled wider. “It’s nothing. He just used to always shout Enough!!”
She nodded, biting her lip. She had to. She had to, had to. She let the anger and nausea in her bubble suicidally. Oh, fuck him if he can’t handle it. I’m sick of being sick.
“Yeah, Xerxes, I can imagine,” she began, with an almost malicious register to her voice. “I know exactly how he must say that. I can imagine it perfectly because … because I heard him.” As if on cue, he squinted his eyes menacingly, just like a movie villain. “Yeah, get ready, because guess what? You know your whole brilliant Iran trip?” He was going to tell her it was her whole brilliant Iran trip in the first place—she seemed to constantly forget that, these days, with that always-anxious look on her face—but he didn’t want to mess with her feelings. For once, Suzanne really looked as if she had had it. The light was out. “Well, here’s yet another bonus to the whole thing—goddamn me and my goddamn birthday gift, the gift that keeps on giving—well, here you go: your father, your very own father, called the other day. Not long ago—don’t freak out on that, I was gonna tell you immediately, it’s just been a day or so—and he wanted to speak to you and lucky for everyone, I guess, you weren’t here. Then he told me he heard we were going to Iran—from your mother, of course—and he said so was he.” She paused, out of breath, trying to read his now wider eyes. “So he’s gonna be there.” He looked dazed and wordless. So she added another jab, just to shake him up, “Well, isn’t that something?”
He nodded slowly. “Incredible,” he rasped.
He lunged for the remote and turned the TV back on. Just in time for them to hear the voices of foreign men, jaggedly accented, over a radio speaker talking of bombs aboard, telling the passengers to stay calm and cooperate, and then a scream or two, and then just static. She wanted to run, run out and away from it and him and everything, but she couldn’t bear to leave him. His eyes looked glazed.
As the TV played the sounds again and again, for
no reason it seemed, but perhaps to display its own brand of terror, she curled up against him, feeling foolish at all her anger, and whispered, “So what do you think?”
He shrugged. “He knows what day?”
She nodded. He didn’t ask if she had told him, but certainly assumed, she assumed herself. She felt as if she had just turned over her killer-lover to the cops.
Appropriately, he responded, “Well, he got me.” He closed his eyes and laughed bitterly to himself and said it again, “Father, you got me.”
“It’s just a few days,” she said. “We can ditch him. Or … you know, Xerxes, you keep forgetting, we can change the dates. Go a whole other time, when the world isn’t that shit on TV, you know? Who knows if it’s safe? Who knows if it’s ever safe over there anyway? You know, we can just cancel it all, forever, you know. …”
He shook his head, shrugged, nodded, and finally let his lips rest on her neck, as he thought. He had become so gentle, she thought, almost kind-spirited. It scared her. Reminded her of all those profiles of the victims on TV, with their relatives talking about their night before, their last call, how they seemed so happy, so calm in their lives at that point. She always equated a new unprecedented calm as a calm before a storm. Especially with an Adam—she had heard about the father, but she knew firsthand from the son.
They went to bed early that night. She asked a few times, “But really are you okay?” All she’d get back was an “mmmhmm” at best and something that looked like a half-nod-half-headshake at worst.
And the next morning, she couldn’t help beginning their day with, “So, Xerxes, what the hell are we going to do? Are we really doing this?”
For a second he looked tense and then there it came: that new laugh of his. That God fuck us all laugh. All he finally said—which helped her learn to drop it and go on with the plan, this anti-plan, this anti-vacation of all vacations, she thought bitterly—was a few final truly enough words,
“I never thought I’d ever have to see him again. But then again, I never thought I’d ever have to see Iran again, did I? So, fine … in an alternative or parallel or whatever universe, I’d say, woman, I suppose, thank you.”
Part Nine
Departures
The day before they were to take off, Xerxes Adam woke up feeling ill. Are you all right? Suzanne kept asking him and he’d nod away. A cold, he would say, just a little spring thing. She’d nod uncertainly until he would ask, What about you? How are you? She’d reply, Just fine, which physically she did feel, but in her head and heart she was in sync with his sickness. She was a wreck. Anything that came into her hands would be quaking along with the rest of her as if her nervousness was rubbing off on inanimate objects, giving them precarious lives of their own.
And so when she felt Xerxes also shaking in her arms, she cried, “Look at you! That’s it—we’re canceling, or postponing. You’re not ready for this either!”
He held her face in his hands and looked deep into her eyes and said, “For the last time, Suzanne, don’t be silly. It’s you. It’s just you. I’m ready. It’s nothing.”
But on that same day, when Al and Eleanor called for what felt like the hundredth time, still trying to persuade their daughter against the whole thing, Suzanne, in arguing for the trip’s validity somewhat against her own will, found herself actually convincing herself that it could be okay. Blindly almost, like a debate team whiz, she shot everything they said down: No no no. This is the most important thing I have done yet! she kept trying to convince them/coach herself.
Meanwhile Xerxes coughed and sniffled as he packed with painful slowness in the background.
“Was that Z—was that a cough!?” Eleanor gasped.
“X, Mother, X,” Suzanne, as usual, muttered under her breath.
“Is he all right?” Al said on the other line.
“Yes, yes, he has … a cold,” Suzanne explained.
“Oh, stunning! A cold and you’re putting him on a plane for what, twenty-four hours??!” Eleanor cried.
“Twelve,” Suzanne said. “Seven hours to Frankfurt, five to Tehran.” They were to leave New York at 4 p.m.; this would have them in Germany by 5:30 a.m., which was actually seven and a half hours. Then they’d have half a day to kill in the Frankfurt airport, till 2:55 p.m. They’d arrive in Tehran at 10:25 p.m., several hours after the Persian New Year had chimed in. Not only did the journey carry the appearance of twenty-four-plus hours, Suzanne was sure it would feel like a lot more. She did not admit this to her mother.
“Kids, they’re kids, they know nothing!” Eleanor shrieked, so abrasively that Suzanne had to distance herself from the receiver.
“What Eleanor means is that we’re trying to figure out why you wouldn’t delay the trip perhaps until he’s better,” Al added. “Airplanes are just terrible for colds. And who knows, it could be more than that. People used to die of the flu—influenza—remember!”
“We’re trying to get to Iran on the New Year,” she snapped. “No delays.”
“He could have some really horrible sickness!” Eleanor added. “You’re not even looking into it! All you kids want to do is … party for New Year’s! Well, I’ll tell you what, missy, in that country I don’t even think they do that—”
“You have a veil?” Al cut in.
“Mmm hmm,” Suzanne said. “A hejab.” It had been in her hands nonstop since she went over to the fabric store and got herself the most simple piece of black cotton they had. That was all you needed, they said. Sure, Iranian women were rumored to be more liberal these days, with more patterned ones in fancier fabrics, but Xerxes had warned her to risk nothing. They would have to lie low. A halfie, who the hell knows what the Iranian government will make of you? Xerxes would tell her, while adding secretly to himself, and a halfie named Needle.
Later that afternoon, Suzanne and Xerxes had their first fight since The Fight. He was back. In a way, she was relieved to see him fighting, no longer that strange ethereally beaming, all-is-well mantraed shade-saint of his old self. Resentment, wrath, and ir-rationality had been reintroduced to his system.
“It’s just the cold—are you happy—just the cold that’s making me an asshole!” he snapped, only somewhat apologetically. “And it’s just the cold that’s making you blow things out of proportion! And your parents—who, by the way, have NO idea what they’re talking about—they just don’t want us to go. The point is, I wish you’d stop fucking things up. Here I am trying to evolve, progress, do something good—”
“Fucking what up?” Suzanne snapped back. “We’re less than twenty-four hours away from our … our trip, and you’re a mess. Physically, psychologically—you know, I think it’s your head that’s making your body fall apart. You’re a mess! Admit it, you’re nervous, too!”
“You’re making me nervous … about nothing!” Xerxes insisted, avoiding her eyes. “We’re taking a goddamn vacation—a vacation that you planned, by the way—which I’m not opposed to, which in fact I was looking forward to—and you’ve been itching for some way out! I can’t take it. …”
“No, no, it’s fine, we’re going,” she said, with a defiant agreeability. “I just want to know what’s wrong with you.”
“Nothing! I have a cold!”
“Go to the doctor then,” she insisted. “As is, I’ve never been so unprepared for anything in my life, Xerxes! So what would a last-minute doctor’s checkup do to mess this mess up any further? Tomorrow, before the flight, make an appointment. Say it’s an emergency. I swear, you have a fever. Just have it checked out. You don’t want your sinuses combusting on a transatlantic flight, Xerxes!”
“Oh, please,” he moaned, rolling his eyes, but he had to admit, he hadn’t thought of that. No, he hadn’t considered his sinuses. Now that he did, he could, in fact, feel his sinuses burning. His ears—he imagined the change in altitude and his ears popping, shattering, spewing blood! She had a point … but he had an argument. “Look, my sinuses will be fine. And there’s no way in this
city that a doctor will see me just like that!”
“My doctor will,” she said. “He’s …” She didn’t want to bring her parents into it again, but weren’t they already so awkwardly wedged in? They and the Account, the Account and its $3,066 in their combined airfare—The Account: wasn’t it the real Iran-pusher in all this? “Look, Dr. Arnold knows me well. And this is an emergency. If you tell anyone, anyone at all, that we’re going to Iran, they’ll drop everything. Dr. Arnold certainly will.”
Xerxes threw his hands helplessly in the air and began laughing, bitterly. “‘Dr. Arnold, please help supply an out for our vacation! Oh, please tell me I have cancer so my girlfriend will be happy! Yes, Dr. Arnold, this was my birthday present from her, but she’d rather I have cancer. …’”
He went on and on. Before he knew it, Suzanne was in tears, half embracing him, half covering his mouth, shushing him like a baby, even though she was the one whimpering, pleading, “Stop it, stop it! I just want it all to be okay, to have whatever control we can over ourselves in all this. …”
Control: Xerxes grinned at her magic word. He continued, “After all, in Iran they don’t have doctors! ‘Please, Doc, diagnose me, because we’re off to the Land Before Medicine!’ That’s what it is, isn’t it—you’re worried I’ll fall dead in the old birthplace. In that old doctorless desert of a country! ‘Oh, Dr. Arnold, please let me have my cancer in New York City only. …’”
When he finally took a moment to see that Suzanne was actually crying hard, he didn’t have the heart to go on. He gave up and held her and promised that if it was possible, fine, for her sake, he’d go. He promised. If she promised one thing.
“Anything, Xerxes.”
“That no matter what—even if I have to take medicine on the ride, there, afterward, whenever—that no matter what—okay, fine, if it’s cancer for real, okay, that’s an exception—but really Suzanne, no matter what the cold or flu or whatever, we’re just gonna do it, do it and get it over with. …” Xerxes had that look: dead serious. And even though it didn’t make any sense—the way he had made the doctor’s visit totally inconsequential—she knew that it was too late. They had to. Get it over with—she blinked at those words, running like ticker tape across her mind. So that was how he thought of it all? She shook her head, knowing it would be worthless—no matter what, he’d come back saying he was fine anyway. Hell, he was fine, but let the doctor tell them that. It was just the last bit of control they had: ascertaining they were going into it wholly intact, knowing that should anything go wrong, it was not them—no, they were healthy and fine and in one piece before they got there.
Sons and Other Flammable Objects Page 29