by Rumaan Alam
“Thank you.” Cheryl wriggled back into her sleeve under the blanket.
“Well, there’s privacy in the ladies’ room, ma’am.”
“Let me ask you. Do you eat in the bathroom?”
The man looked down at her. “It’s just a policy.”
“It’s fine, Rebecca. I’m done, anyway.” Cheryl seemed harried.
Rebecca was not finished. “Would you eat a hamburger in the bathroom? Put your plate on the toilet seat, sit down, chow down?”
“We’ve had customers complain, ma’am.” The man seemed annoyed.
Rebecca laughed. “There’s no one in here but us.”
“I’m just telling you what the policy is.” He shrugged.
“It’s fine. We’re all done, anyway.” Cheryl began folding the blanket. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank him!” Rebecca did not mean to scold but she did. She turned to the man. “The policy is silly. You wouldn’t eat in the bathroom. But you want this child to? This is a museum of natural history. Nature! It’s too good. The irony is too good.”
“OK, ma’am. You have a good day.” The man wandered away.
“I am having a good day.” Rebecca smiled at Ivy, her damp lips, her slightly crossed eyes. “I am having a good day.”
21
REBECCA WAS INVITED—THOUGH, WHAT’S THE VERB WHEN AN INVITATION cannot be declined?—to New Haven. The logistics were anxiety inducing. Andrew was nearly one but stubbornly still a baby. As he’d little interest in walking, he needed toting from place to place. Jacob had been difficult, terrible threes not twos, collapsing over the slightest of slights. The block tower did not hold: tears. The page he most wanted to look at in his truck book eluded him: screams. Rebecca found herself at such times giving him the silent treatment. Once, after a tantrum, he’d reached for his mother’s arm and she’d recoiled.
It required a public relations push to prevail upon Judith. Christine was out of the question, though the middle sister was more amenable. She had a baby of her own! Judith and Steven had all those bedrooms and only Jennifer, whom they dressed like a living doll, in Laura Ashley dresses that hung below the knee, and for whom they’d bought a horse. Rebecca knew Judith felt guilty: the twenty-thousand-dollar animal, the spare Mercedes, their stubbornly white streets in a historically black city. She volunteered with Planned Parenthood as means of redress. Andrew was adorable and he was also a trump card. Rebecca packed diapers and clothes and stuffed animals and dropped the boys at their aunt’s home before proceeding to the train station.
Everything was just whim and luck, right? She just happened to have been rereading Sandover. Merrill, Merrill, merrily—he might like or understand or be amused by what she was up to, might he not? The pages and pages that had metastasized in the happy interval during which Priscilla was alive, the work that Priscilla’s work had allowed. It was like the words and pages had grown independently of Rebecca; she had as hazy a recollection of that labor as she did of her labor. The body doesn’t remember pain. Of course, Merrill was the judge for the series so why the hell not, and her instinct had been well founded. Surely he of all people would have relished the role of chance in the thing.
From the day she won the Younger Poets prize until the day Priscilla had been sent to the hospital, Rebecca felt invincible. Now, if Rebecca looked at the book’s cover, she thought of Priscilla. A victory made into something else.
Rebecca sat on the train and thought about how unusual it was just to sit in the quiet. Andrew woke, most days, in a wonderful mood, in a joy that turned quickly into a powerful hunger, his Mama increasingly urgent, loud, though it never took her that long to get from her bed to his. His cries inevitably woke Jacob. Once, Jacob, stern, rubbing his eyes, his voice froggy, had stood in the hall, hair hilariously akimbo, and said, Can’t you make him be quiet? He sounded like the man he’d one day be.
She couldn’t make him be quiet: children are either quiet or they’re not, and neither of hers were. The days were cacophonous: microwave beeping, radio chatting, Jacob barking, Andrew chattering, and often the television, too, because they’d beg for it and without the intercession of the television she’d never defecate again. There was yelling about the brushing of teeth and about whatever Andrew had done to bother his brother. There were screams as Rebecca worked the thick cream into Andrew’s hair; the screams would be louder if she failed to do this and then picked at the tiny knots in his taut curls the following day. There were spilled cups of water and shitty diapers made worse when Andrew plopped down onto his rump. There were missing puzzle pieces and pages torn from books. There were stained T-shirts and crushed dreams (“I want that other Lego/GI Joe/Matchbox car”). There was the enmity that was fraternity, and it was a noisy business.
They had spent many hot afternoons in the backyard wading pool. Rebecca remembered, every time it came time to top the thing off, Priscilla’s mouth on the little rubber nipple. She fell asleep and woke as the train neared Penn Station. What a blight. Rebecca walked the few blocks through town to Grand Central Terminal. She felt utterly alone and unremarked upon and this was a joy.
There were so many black people in New York, so different from Bethesda. Andrew was so like Priscilla—his face, his bearing, even as a baby—that it may as well have been the Immaculate Conception. There were times, seeing a black man, Rebecca would stare, study, consider: Was that him, was that the guy? Cheryl and Rebecca had studied the telephone bill and asked friends, though Priscilla did not have many. She was not active in a church, was not a part of any other group, was just another untethered American, bowling along alone and certain that was the way she liked it. This was vindicating; the realization that the intimacy Rebecca sometimes worried was her imagination was indeed quite real. Of course, Rebecca might simply have asked Priscilla, while she was still able. She never had. It was not her business, but now it was the unfinished business of Rebecca’s and Andrew’s lives.
They got nowhere. Rebecca knew the man could have been white, or Ecuadorian, or Bangladeshi. But black men were the only ones she scrutinized, because they were the boy’s future. One day she’d be an old woman and a black man would come and kiss her cheeks and she would hold him to her breast and remember that he’d been her baby.
Rebecca caught sight of Grand Central. She thanked Mrs. Kennedy for saving the beautiful building. Her mother had taught Rebecca that, because Lorraine revered the president’s widow. A person needed that, in the world: a guide or an incentive, like the mechanical rabbit a dog chases at the track. Maybe that’s what Diana meant, Diana who had only just been once more mere miles from Rebecca, meeting with Barbara Bush to discuss AIDS. She’d worn a suit, was quite thin, her hair cut closer. She’d grown into a self-possessed elegance. She stood beside Mrs. Bush, hands demurely behind her back, shoulders still hunched to correct for her height, creating an impression of modesty. She was a woman of the new decade, powerful shoulders but radiant, unabashed, in pink. Rebecca wondered if James Merrill had AIDS. It was known or obvious that he was homosexual and hard to tell if the leanness of his face was age or something more nefarious. Rebecca had loved that poem about his nanny. Having known grief and hardship, Mademoiselle / Knows little more. She wanted to tell him about Priscilla, but barely knew where to begin.
Lorraine hadn’t wanted to be Mrs. Kennedy—probably?—and Rebecca didn’t want to be Diana, but they wanted to be modern and interesting and beautiful and maternal and care about historical buildings and AIDS patients. Rebecca wanted to hold James Merrill’s hand, out of gratitude but to prove to herself that she was the woman she wanted to be, the sort of woman who could.
She barely got the chance. In New Haven, Rebecca shook lots of hands and only barely touched Merrill on the shoulder. She was called upon to read and so she did, not in that stupid breathy way of poets who happen to be women. Rebecca barked as she did, sometimes (to always instant regret) at Jacob, when he was his most recalcitrant. There were so many people about and they took Rebecca f
or something that she was only sometimes sure she was. Either she was playing pretend on the playground or she was an impostor, there, in that beautiful library. One of the librarians showed her a Gutenberg bible.
The next morning the bed seemed very large, though it was not especially so. She lay in the quiet room and looked at the wall. She would call her sister, but knew the boys were fine, and knew Christopher was then, too, waking up, and he, too, was fine. There were four hours until anyone would need her. It was like she’d slipped into some alternate dimension, some state of biological repose. She’d read that caterpillars in the cocoon liquefy entirely before re-forming into butterflies. That was how she felt: a mass of liquid, a mush of cells, destined to become itself but not there quite yet.
Then she showered and put on an Armani skirt that was a year older than Jacob, but she didn’t care whether it was still, strictly speaking, fashionable. She was a visiting poet, that bar was set quite low. She put on a white shirt and a black sweater. For Diana, dressing was diplomacy. For Rebecca, it was like a lover whose company she’d forgotten she’d enjoyed. People changed.
Rebecca looked in the mirror but did not really see. She’d been trained in these womanly arts at an early age—two older sisters—but while the art was to assess, it was not to see. The goal was to master the line, the flick, the dust, the lacquer, to shift eyes this way and that, to lift the lips thus, to squint, to scrutinize, to create a self, not consider the one that actually existed.
She visited a class, and though a Younger Poet officially Rebecca felt much older than the students: boys in plaid shirts, girls in heavy boots. They asked the usual, queries that said more about the petitioner than anything else. Rebecca offered answers, grew distracted, and yearned to be away from this classroom, like every other classroom. She missed home, the patch of unforgiving late-summer afternoon sun that warmed the pool water, the plastic cars underfoot, the undone dishes, the unanswered question of dinner, the junk mail, the occasional tables, the prints from the National Gallery, the books she hadn’t looked at in a while. A year ago she’d have thought Yale University where she wanted to be, but there she was and it was devoid of whatever she had hoped to find there.
A journey in reverse is never the same. Connecticut seemed less verdant, Grand Central less what its name promised, the walk to Penn Station tinged with malice, every passerby a criminal. She got off the train and Baltimore was dark and unhappy. Judith’s house seemed so big as to be garish. Jacob was weepy, Andrew sleepy. They both fussed in the car, then quieted, the two boys frowning out of the windows, damp eyes and sour smells. There was traffic, and they were not home until late, and Christopher hadn’t left a light on for them. Rebecca microwaved oatmeal because she was too tired to think of anything more interesting, and didn’t bathe them, because they were too tired.
Rebecca stood in the foyer and considered the abandoned overnight bags, the mail on the floor. She’d only just wanted to come back there and there she was and she wanted to be in some other place. She picked up the mail and put it on the table. She put the six abandoned shoes in their slots in the closet.
She put the dishes in the sink, running the water to loosen the plaster of cereal. She sat at the island, eating pretzels without enjoying them, and looking out of the window, though it was dark out and light within, so all she was doing was staring at her reflection without seeing herself. The hollow crunch echoed in her head. As a girl, she’d not understood that the food echoes in your own ears more loudly than it does in others’. Mortified, she’d tried to chew quietly.
She heard Christopher’s car a little before eight, which seemed late and expected, and seemed like something she’d been waiting for and a surprise. She had filled the dishwasher and sat listening to the machine’s reassuring gurgle.
“You’re back.”
She found that she could not smile. In that moment, as fleeting and terrible as the feeling she sometimes had about Jacob, she hated Christopher. Nine years ago, she hadn’t even known the man, had never conceived of his existence, could have foreseen a life that had nothing whatever to do with him or indeed anyone like him. But here she was in a well-appointed kitchen with dirty floors and a thrumming dishwasher and bright overhead lights eating pretzels. “We’re back.”
“And how was it?”
His unlacing and stepping out of his Lobbs, tugging at the tie, slipping out of the jacket, moving the attaché from floor to table, dislodging the mail she’d just left there: all of it struck Rebecca as silly or too perfect or maddening or just more of the business of being a man. Rebecca wanted a drink, but there was nothing to drink. “It was fine. It was good. To be away, to be there. To celebrate and be celebrated. It was a reminder.”
Christopher rummaged in the fridge. “That’s good. The boys are good? No trouble? I’m sure your sister and her staff managed.”
It was a routine, a joke they had, Judith and her Filipina nanny, her personal trainer, the Latinos who tended the landscaping. “You might have left a light on for me.”
Christopher’s eyebrows danced with no joy. “Sorry?”
There was no anger, just clarity. “You might have. Left a light on. In the house. For me, coming home, with our baby, our son, the bags, you might have.”
Christopher put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed them. “I’m sorry. I ran out this morning.” He sat next to her and tried to catch her eye. “It has been a terrible day. I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
“What happened?” She had ceded enough of herself to him and the boys that she wanted, truly, to know.
Christopher smelled of old smoke and sweat, but this was not unappealing. “Something is . . . well, I’m a little worried, if you want the truth.”
Christopher was given to understatement. He was unable to scold Jacob properly. Everything seemed distant and ironic when he said it. Rebecca knew that this was his way of saying that the evening had been worse for him than it had been for her. Indeed, hers had been strangely pleasant. Sometimes it was satisfying to be left alone. Rebecca remembered that she loved this man and touched him on the forearm. “Of course I want the truth.”
“I had lunch with Dan Diamond today—remember him? He was at the Treasury, now he’s on K Street. He was surprised that I had left the embassy for the bank. He said I should have called him first.”
Rebecca had no mental image of this Dan, another of the many anonymous Dans in the world. “Why would you have done that?”
“Well, he’s someone who knows things. And maybe he’s right. He thinks—he’s just repeating what he’s heard, I should stress. This is just gossip. But he’s heard talk of some funny business at the bank.”
“Funny.” Numbers made no sense to her, banking made even less.
“Of course, this is how it always is. Banks, enormous sums of money, it’s not quite corruption but you know, it’s easy, and tempting. Money begets money. So you can make a pile, just on the strength of momentarily possessing someone else’s money.”
“Isn’t that—the actual definition of a bank?”
“Correct. Christ, don’t we have anything to drink?”
Rebecca went into the dining room and brought back the gin. She poured some into a glass, added sparkling water. “There’s no lime.”
Christopher took the glass. “Getting tough on corruption is always popular, no matter who’s president. That’s why BCCI is under audit. But Dan says—what he’s heard is that maybe BCCI and my bank aren’t necessarily unrelated.”
It had been on the radio, but those four initials meant nothing to Rebecca’s life. “So what’s he saying exactly?”
“Maybe I’m paranoid. I’ve heard those names. Abedi. Naqvi. The BCCI guys, the big ones, I’ve heard about them, at parties, around the office. I knew some of these guys, when I was at the embassy.”
“So you’re—worried.” Why pretend understanding? When the boys went to bed late, they woke early, which meant she would, too.
Christopher finish
ed the drink. “If BCCI is going to collapse, there will be a postmortem, and there will be people who ask whether we were in business with them.”
Rebecca pictured a bank, some anonymous brick building, falling in on itself. The strange satisfaction of destruction. “Guilt by association.”
“What if we are in business with them? We’re an American bank. There are laws. There will be consequences.”
How she wanted to say it: I told you so. “You loved working at the embassy. Maybe you just miss the foreign service. It was a noble cause.”
“I just wanted to—” He exhaled. “I wanted something different. I wanted to be bigger, I suppose. Make money, do something.”
“Why don’t you go back?”
“It’s not even been a year—besides, Thatcher has—days, weeks maybe. Hard to say who’ll be there next, what will happen next.”
“No one knows what’s going to happen next.” A folly, she wanted to point out, but she did not. This was a word that had lodged in her mind, a word on its way to a poem. “We’ll be fine.” This was the same conversation she’d had with Cheryl in the hospital cafeteria. This was her fundamental belief.
“There’s less money than you might think.”
“I don’t care.” This was a liberty. Rebecca had never once envisioned money as her future, even if to not think about money presumed the existence of some. “I’m not worried.” But she was, because he so clearly was.
“If they’ve done something wrong, then so have I. Do you see?” He finished his drink. “I thought I might be important. Might make deals. Might help the bank raise its profile. I was supposed to come in and talk to the senators. To Kennedy, to Murkowski. I was supposed to help with deals.”
“Maybe it’s nothing.”
“Maybe it is. I’m sorry I didn’t tidy up. Leave a light on. I was distracted.”
Christopher was so handsome. And he loved her. If he was thoughtless, sometimes, well, who was not? Rebecca had been ready for something else—a porcelain demitasse smashed in a moment of pique, a voice raised until one of the children stirred. Her breath felt heavy now, exhausted. Despite the hunger that now settled over her—pretzels were nothing—she knew she’d go upstairs, and Christopher would lie on top of her, his body lean and hard and fragrant, and push against her, and into her, and she would try to lose herself in it, and maybe would, for a time. Christopher would sweat, and then pull on his pajama pants and go and stand in the garage and smoke a Silk Cut and she would fall asleep and wake in five hours, still smelling of her sweat and his semen, and forget everything that had happened that day until some vague undetermined point in the future.