by Paul Heald
Brenda had befriended Elisa their very first day at the World Trade Organization. She had sidled over with a cup of tea during the morning orientation session for new employees and by lunchtime had convinced her new friend that they should share an apartment together in Annemasse, just over the border in France, where they could save money on living expenses. Brenda was not the tidiest roommate, but she did her share of the cooking and included Elisa in every social event on her calendar. She just knew how to draw people out. Many was the night when Elisa was dragged away from a boring pile of documents to a museum opening or a party by the irrepressible Londoner.
Thankfully, Brenda’s newest young man was polite and did not spend too much time staring at her sweater. He was over six feet in height, with long brown hair drooping down into an intelligent face. When he set his large backpack on the floor, she sensed a wiry strength in his lean frame. He was wearing shorts and hiking boots, and his calves were tense and muscled as if he had spent more time walking around Europe than riding trains. He seemed genuinely interested in what each girl was doing in Geneva and was surprised to learn that they were not students, but rather professionals at the WTO. Unlike most Americans, he knew more about the organization than just its acronym, and his eyes sparkled when he posed a teasing question about their plans to establish a one-world government and rule the world from Geneva.
“Not us!” Brenda exclaimed as she leaned to the side and bumped his shoulder. “That’s the bloody Freemasons. They’re over at the United Nations in that cute little pyramid building.” She laughed and tipped her glass at a table of Asian men. “It’s them you’ve got to worry about. If the Chinese government ever gets sorted, they’ll be running everything.”
Elisa rolled her eyes while the young man laughed. Brenda was already reeling him in. She did it so effortlessly. Elisa felt self-conscious and socially paralyzed whenever she set her sights on some handsome guy. That’s why she preferred to wait for Mr. Right to magically arrive all wrapped up and tidy, no fuss, no mess, no bother. The American across the table, however, had her second-guessing her strategy.
“I’m from a small town in Georgia called Clarkeston,” he revealed when finally asked. Elisa had been impressed that he did not plunge into his life story as soon as he sat down, preferring instead to learn about the young women first. Americans were usually insistent on talking about themselves early and often. “You remember the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta? I live about seventy miles from there.”
“Was your family originally French?” Elisa asked, a second beer jolting her mouth into gear. “Granville is a French name, isn’t it?”
He nodded his head and continued. He looked at-home in the cozy bar, rumpled shirt and hiking boots meshing harmoniously with the dark scuffed wood of the tables and booths. Elisa wondered how he would fit in with the rest of Geneva, the starched and tidy world of bureaucrats and bankers who dominated life away from the train station.
“My grandfather was from Quebec. He and my grandmother met during the war and she dragged him back to Georgia.” He laughed, a pleasant rumble that started low in his chest. “I remember asking my mom why he talked so funny.”
“And let me guess what you’re doing here, Monsieur Granville,” Brenda interjected with a sloppy French accent. “Taking a gap year and traveling around Europe.” How did she flirt so easily? There was nothing untoward about her approach, no thigh-rubbing or lip-licking, just good old-fashioned eye contact. How hard could that be?
“I wish I had a year,” he sighed, “I’ve just got the summer before I start work at the local newspaper. I studied photojournalism in college.” He mentioned the career in an offhand way, as if it were devoid of glamour. “And you can just call me Jacob.”
* * *
Jacob Granville stayed in the women’s apartment in Annemasse for almost a week during the summer of 2008, sleeping on the sofa and demonstrating some thoughtfulness by waiting until they had left for work in the morning to use their only bathroom. By the time they came home in the evening, he had usually straightened up the small living room and washed the dishes. He even cooked for them twice. Although Brenda clearly claimed him, he did not sleep in her bedroom, perhaps because they did not want to make Elisa feel uncomfortable. Nonetheless, he was not a monk. Or gay. One weekday, Elisa came home at lunchtime to fetch a book and found that Brenda had beaten her home. She never saw her roommate, but the enthusiastic cries coming from her bedroom left no doubt that the English girl was home and sharing a midday tryst with the handsome American.
Elisa had never heard Brenda be so vocal before. On other occasions, she must have been muffling her passion to avoid shocking her roommate. The embarrassed Dutch girl half expected the door of the bedroom to burst open and the two lovers to come spilling out into the living room biting and clawing each other like a pair of wet house cats. She paused a moment at the front door, but when the furor showed no signs of subsiding, she crept over to the living room table, picked up her book, and slipped out of the apartment. She had planned on making an egg sandwich in the kitchen but made do with a cheap crepe from a sidewalk cart. Meeting the couple right after their noisy lovemaking would have been too weird.
Later that day, after cooking a passable spaghetti dinner, Granville proposed leading a long walk on a path he had discovered in the Bois des Côtes, the biggest green space in their suburb of Annemasse. Brenda had turned an ankle in her heels on the way home from her office and encouraged Elisa to go with him. When Brenda pulled a stack of files out of her briefcase and waved her hand, it was clearly up to Elisa to entertain their guest for the evening. He put his right arm akimbo in a gesture that invited her to link up with him, and soon they were strolling out into the lengthening shadows of a warm summer evening.
Elisa was surprised that he kept hold of her for several blocks before finally disengaging in response to a group of teenagers blocking the sidewalk in front of them. When they met again on the far side of the pack, he turned to her and smiled. “You’re certainly quiet today.” She realized that she had not spoken a word since they had left the apartment. “Tough day at the office?”
The toughest thing about her day had been the cheese-and-mushroom crepe she had bought for lunch, but she had no wish to mention what had prompted the unfortunate purchase. “No, not at all. It was actually a pretty interesting day.”
“What did you work on?”
“Do you really want to know?” She looked up at him with doubting eyes. He had been a considerate temporary roommate, but she still did not entirely trust him. His politeness seemed insincere and his southern American accent sounded strangely contrived to someone who had polished her English skills by listening to BBC One.
“Absolutely!” His enthusiasm sounded genuine. “It’s not often that I get a peek at the inner workings of the World Trade Organization.”
“Well, to start off with, it’s not quite the place you might think it is. When I finished my PhD, I came here to be a little liberal mouse—mole?—in this big organization dedicated to evil globalization, but my first assignment was to help plug a loophole in compulsory licensing regulations for AIDS drugs that made it difficult for poor countries to get cheap pharmaceuticals. Have you ever heard of the Doha Declaration?”
He shook his head as they rounded a corner and headed toward a large green space several blocks distant.
“I helped draft it, and I was so surprised when we—the WTO—declared that Indian and Brazilian generic manufacturers should be allowed to import cheap drugs to South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe without the permission of American and EU pharmaceutical companies. I still watch out for the big corporate boogeyman, but mostly I get to do really productive stuff like counsel developing countries how to creatively adapt to all these confusing intellectual property treaties.”
“You sound a lot like Brenda.” He laughed. “She gets really defensive if I kid her about the WTO and corporations running the world.”
“I can imagine.” She
turned to him and explained while they waited at a stoplight. “She works in the section on Subsidies and Countervailing Duties, which sounds pretty boring, but basically her job is to help police countries that subsidize their goods at the expense of outside competition. She’s been trying to convince the EU to drop some of the agriculture subsidies that make it so hard for farmers in developing countries to sell their products here. Imagine you’re some poor orange farmer in Tunisia and you want to sell your crop in Europe, but the prices here are artificially low because the EU pays millions to Spanish orange growers. Sixty percent of the EU budget goes to agriculture subsidies! Brenda is fighting to open the EU market to the poorest of the poor farmers, so she really resents people trashing the WTO.”
They crossed the last street in front of them and approached a wooded area. Granville led them fifty yards to its edge before ducking into a large bush. She found the narrow gap, pushed a branch out of her hair, and then cautiously followed him into the undergrowth. He was waiting a few yards ahead, proudly tracing the course of a footpath with a sweep of his arm.
“I found this yesterday,” he said. “It goes up the hill to the other side of the city.” He put his arm on a low tree branch and leaned against it. “We’ll have to catch the bus home, but it’s a nice walk over if you’re up for it.”
The trail looked well worn and safe, but the woods were gloomy and it would be dark in less than two hours. She looked up at him doubtfully, but his smile brimmed with confidence and he started to pad up the trail without waiting for her to answer. When she followed, he picked up the conversation where it had left off.
“So, if the EU won’t budge, what happens? Do jackbooted thugs from Geneva invade Brussels?” She pulled even with him on a broad section of the trail and puzzled out the meaning of jackbooted thugs.
“No,” she explained, “the WTO cannot force any country to change its laws, but it can require that compensation be paid by a country that doesn’t comply with the rules, or it could authorize trade sanctions, like a new tariff or something like that. Brenda’s trying to figure out how to change the rules to make more countries lower their subsidies.”
Elisa looked down the path into the dark corridor of foliage ahead and saw the track extended for fifty meters or so before it bent uphill and sharply to the right. The woods were already plunging into dusk and she felt an involuntary shiver as they left the comforting hum of traffic behind them.
She cast a quick glance at her companion. He was beaming and a bit too close, eager to drag her along on his big adventure. Granville was friendly and physically attractive, but what did she really know about him? If he were Italian, she would fear nothing worse than an attempted kiss or a possible squeeze of her backside, with a rebuff ending in nothing worse than a shrug of the shoulders and a return to the status quo. A Frenchman might be just as forward but would be more likely to storm off in a huff when rejected. She had never dealt with an American—not that she thought it likely Jacob was interested—and she found it difficult to put aside her prejudices. Americans were different. Whether the news was about Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer, the Dutch people had long concluded that there was some sickness deep in American society. Most Americans were good-hearted and generous, but for some reason their country seemed to breed a special class of dangerous men. Even when things went wrong in Europe, like the Dunblane school massacre, the comparisons were inevitably to atrocities that had occurred first in the US.
As if he could read her mind, he moved away from her with another smile and struck off down the trail. She stood for a moment, shook off her paranoia, and followed the athletic figure in the stained leather boots. He must have heard her steps for he spoke without turning around. “It will take us about twenty minutes to get to the ridge, where we’ll finally get a view.”
He walked steadily, long strides eating up the terrain. She kept up without difficulty, grateful that her jogging routine and resistance to Brenda’s offers of after-dinner cigarettes kept her in good shape. As the path started to level out and they approached the ridge, the trees thinned and she could see the sprawling suburb of Annemasse below them. It did not compare with the view down on Paris from Sacré Coeur, but it was satisfying to see the streets of her adopted home spread out before her. She took the last few steps to the crest and then saw Geneva, framed by a ring of rolling hills.
As she looked to the northwest, over Lac Leman, she felt her hiking partner come up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. He spun her slowly ninety degrees, rotating his body behind hers. She stiffened but did not fight the firm sinew of his grip.
“See the little park and the red-brick building on the corner?” He spoke softly, his lips just inches from her right ear. “We live in the apartment block right next door. You can barely make out the building—you see the antennas on the roof?”
She found it impossible to concentrate on the view. Her eyes darted from place to place, and she was keenly aware of Granville’s fingers resting on the edge of her collarbone. She turned suddenly and he released her. He was much taller and they stood so close that her gaze matched his Adam’s apple. She looked up and his eyes narrowed.
“Are you afraid of me?” His usually smooth voice sounded dry and clinical.
“Of course not!” she exclaimed, involuntarily taking a step back. “I mean, why should I be? We’re friends, aren’t we?”
He looked at her hard before relaxing, and she noticed his shoulders drop slightly, as if some tension in his back had been released. “I hope so! I mean, Brenda is really special, but you’re awesome too. If you all ever came to Georgia, I could show you some real southern hospitality.”
Elisa relaxed, too, and chided herself for being so jumpy. This is why I never have a boyfriend, she thought, I always think the worst of people. She turned away, looked out over Annemasse, and resolved to be more open with him. “I would love to go to the States sometime. It’s been great having you here.”
“I’m so glad.” His voice was behind her again, not as close as before, but she knew that if she reached backward with her hand, she would touch him. “I thought that you might be mad about Brenda this afternoon.”
She kept her gaze straight ahead, scrambling to figure out how he could know that she had overhead the bumping and thrashing in her roommate’s bedroom. “Huh?”
“Oh, come on.” He leaned against her shoulder as they looked out over the city. “I put my cup of coffee on your book this morning, and when I got up, uh, afterward, it was gone … You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes.”
His voice sounded neither sinister nor humorous; yet still, it was provocative, as if he hoped she would be scandalized or might comment favorably on the extraordinary noises he had elicited from his girlfriend. She had no idea what to say. A witty response and a quick start down the path to the bus was the best plan, but nothing clever came to mind.
As she stood for a long moment, avoiding his eyes by pretending to survey the city, he strode purposefully away from her side. “Let’s go,” he said, tossing the words over his shoulder. “I could use a cold beer after this climb.”
She turned and watched him slide underneath the crest of the ridge. She shook her head, both as a gesture of incomprehension and to clear the cobwebs, before she followed his hungry stride down the hill and back to the reassuring confluence of cars, scooters, buildings, and streetlamps.
A week later, Jacob announced his departure after a breakfast of warm croissants he had fetched from the small bakery around the corner from the apartment. After he shouldered his backpack, he gave Elisa a hug while Brenda looked on, arms crossed over her chest, red-rimmed eyes cast downward, farewells having been said earlier that morning behind closed doors.
* * *
Late in the evening on her way to bed, Elisa tapped on Brenda’s door and found her friend sitting in bed with her back against the wall, reading a book. She was less distressed than she had been that morning, but her face was pale and she looked exhausted
. Elisa felt immediately drawn to her. She sat down on the bed and asked how she was doing, and Brenda held up the book in response.
“Jacob gave me this as a present before he left: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. It takes place in Georgia.” She laid the book down in her lap with a sigh. “I’m sorry I’m being so antisocial. I’m usually not this silly about a guy.”
“Maybe you should visit him there on your next vacation?” She looked at the cover of the paperback. The book looked depressing, with a stone angel looming like a vulture over a decaying cemetery. Brenda’s fingers traced the embossed edge of the book cover.
“Maybe,” she replied in a weak and unconvincing voice. She sat in a pair of men’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt, a diminished version of her normally commanding self. Elisa made a short speech about what a special guy Jacob was, but her attempt at comfort failed and eventually she put a hand briefly on her friend’s shoulder and left. Fourteen months later Elisa would find her friend in the same bedroom, dead from an apparent drug overdose that the police suspected had been staged to look like an accident.
X.
HIEROGLYPHICS (2013)
“ I’m home!” James failed to catch himself and muttered a quick Shit as he entered the house. His wife had been absent for three days, but this was the first time that he forgot to suppress the greeting he usually offered as he arrived home. Sondra hated being startled, so he had developed the habit of announcing himself rather than risking the charge that he was creeping up and spying on her. She was still gone, and he could only speculate how long it would take before she tired of her sister’s vegetarian cooking and returned.
The first time she left, after he had announced he was turning down a better job at an Atlanta paper ten years earlier, he was crushed and then panicked at the thought their marriage might be over. But after a week of silence and despair, he saw her reappear without explanation, and he was so grateful that it took him days to press her as to where she had been. This was the fourth or fifth time that she had stormed angrily out of his life, and he was now resigned to her refusal to return his phone calls.