“Ronnie Jack. Black, hard-left politically. Radical politics in the Sixties, militant . . . ”
“Panthers, then.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But armed resistance, anyway, up against the wall, all that. I think I am a bit drunk.” Zan holds his head a moment. Because he’s prone to migraines, it’s normal that with the first sip of liquor his head begins throbbing. “But when I knew him, like everyone in the Eighties, he had left the Sixties behind.”
It was a common story in the Eighties, of course—former Sixties radicals in the mainstream, doing well. Ronnie Jack loved the best clothes, the best cars, the best stereo equipment, good food, beautiful women—the Stalinist from Esquire, still talking left “and I mean left,” says Zan, “I don’t mean New Left, I mean Marxist-Leninist left,” which seemed quaint even with the Cold War still going on. Ronnie Jack took the good-will trips to the Soviet Union and considered the people there to “have it pretty good,” in his words; and if, as Zan did once or twice, the contradiction was noted between Ronnie’s politics and the high life he lived, Ronnie would answer, I just think everyone should have the best clothes and best cars and best stereo equipment and beautiful women.
Zan and Ronnie Jack worked in the same building, where the former wrote for a travel magazine and the latter was in the public relations department of an insurance firm. They met through Jenna, a Stalinist that Zan was dating and with whom Ronnie Jack—more the ladies’ man than Zan ever was—had gotten nowhere. “Wait,” Brown says now, “you were dating a Stalinist?”
What can Zan say? She was a hot Stalinist. Brown hair, brown eyes, the smile and body of an italian starlet. “But didn’t the fact,” says Brown, “that she was a Stalinist . . . ?”
“Oh, of course,” scoffs Zan. “But you know, I convinced myself it was somehow no different than one of us being a Republican and the other a Democrat, and particularly since I was neither, I thought we just wouldn’t talk politics. What I didn’t know is that if you’re a Stalinist, there’s nothing that isn’t political.” Jenna literally was a card-carrying member of the Party even if Zan never saw the card; and he was so fraught to sleep with her that he went to a couple of meetings, where everyone was ancient, the median age well over seventy—so it became obvious what the Party saw in Jenna, which was the same thing Zan saw: a sexy young woman in her mid-twenties, putting a beautiful and glamorous face on the movement.
After that, it became difficult for Zan to take seriously certain national paranoias. The idea that these codgers were going to take over the country, that the country had to be on its guard against them every moment, was laughable, not only because they were feeble in body but because among them there wasn’t a single independent thought. If, for instance, in the course of one of Jenna’s monologues about fascism it was pointed out that Stalin and Hitler had a pact, Jenna denied it ever happened, insisting it was a creation of an elitist media—something Zan hears back home now, where no compass is consulted in common, where the designation of north is considered by some a state plot, where facts and information are the coordinates of suspect maps, where people who actually know things are the enemies of “common sense.” Soon sex with Jenna wasn’t worth it anymore, not least because sexual licentiousness was yet another myth about a doctrinaire Left that in fact regarded eroticism as decadence, a mass social opiate like religion. She was the single most repressed woman he ever knew.
What survived Zan’s affair with Jenna, at least for a while, was a friendship with her comrade if not lover Ronnie Jack. Perhaps the fact that neither man was sleeping with Jenna provided a bond. Then Zan got fired from the travel magazine for “insubordination” and being a “disruptive influence,” the last time until lately that he was considered by anyone as volatile, and which he took as a sign to finish what still could be called his most recent novel—“most recent!” Zan laughs to Brown. “That makes it sound, well, fucking recent, doesn’t it?” In the novel was a very small character, a few paragraphs in a single chapter, based on Ronnie. Zan changed a detail or two but not, as it turned out, enough, because when the book was published, someone in the insurance company where Ronnie worked read it and concluded that the black man working in his department was the Stalinist with a militant past in the Sixties—and Ronnie lost his job.
Zan pleads to Brown, “What are the odds? This was twenty years after all the Panther stuff, if that’s what it was, and this novel was read by, you know, a hundred and thirteen people on the planet, eighty-seven of them in Japan or some place–and one just happens to work in the same insurance company as Ronnie Jack Flowers? It was enough to make me believe in all their conspiracies after all. And what I didn’t understand in my white naïveté is that west of Connecticut there literally was a single black executive in the insurance business. If I just had left out the word ‘insurance,’ nothing would have happened. One detail too many. Mostly, though, I thought, Who cares? And of course that was the most naïve thing of all. Who cares anymore what anyone did in the Sixties? Isn’t half the workforce former radicals now paying into pension funds?”
Brown says, “Another vodka, then?”
“No,” says Zan.
“This story is somehow directed at me, I take it?”
“I’m not sure anymore,” Zan says sincerely, “but then I’m not finished. Let me finish and we’ll decide.”
“Lovely,” Brown shifts in his chair.
“There’s two points, really, one I was trying to make to Viv, whose culpability in the matter of whatever happened to the woman who may or may not be Zema’s mother—”
“Whose?”
“—Sheba’s mother is far less than mine in the whole Ronnie Jack Flowers affair, and that point is, Viv is responsible for doing what she can to make things right, but she can’t hold herself responsible for how things turn out, because we live in a world where sometimes the right thing is just not going to turn out. The other point has to do with Ronnie himself, who I saw being interviewed on a ‘news’ cable channel, if you can call this particular channel such a thing, while we were waiting in the airport to come to London and for Viv to go on to Ethiopia.”
Brown says, “He’s become a prominent figure, then.”
“Now,” Zan explains, “he’s vice-chairman or co-director for something called Civic Organizers Network, and his politics are as far to the right as they once were to the left. And here’s the thing—Ronnie hasn’t changed at all, as far as I can tell. Because the specific content of his views is beside the point. The point is the totalitarian pathology, the pathology of zealotry or, if you want to put it in more secular terms, ideology. Because what the zealot or ideologue really believes in is the zealous nature itself, the devout embrace of hard distinctions—the crusade against gray. It’s a story as old as the original novel, historical or not—the Damascan convert. The completely adamant non-believer who becomes the believer, and the thing that hasn’t altered an iota is his adamancy.”
“Not to mention that perhaps this chap’s politics were always as opportunistic as you suspected.”
“That’s not for me to say, and it takes me off the hook for nothing.”
“I think perhaps this story,” says Brown, “is less about my zealotry, as you’ve characterized it—that part, I assume, is directed at me—and more about why you haven’t written a novel since.”
“Touché,” says Zan, lifting to him the empty vodka glass. “I would drink to you if my glass weren’t empty.”
“I offered you another, didn’t I?” Brown points out. “And I assume this new novel you’re writing now,” he continues, gesturing in the direction of Zan’s daughter digging into her fish and chips, “is about a white man raising a black daughter at the same time a black bloke is president of his country?”
Zan is shocked. “Of course not.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are things about race that no white person can understand. Because no white author has the moral authority, not to mention insi
ght or wisdom, to write such a book. Don’t be daft, as you Brits would say.”
They get to the station in time for the night’s last express back to London. On the platform the two men shake hands; Brown watches the nanny pull Sheba onto the train, Parker leading the way. “So it’s working out, then,” Brown says.
“I think so,” Zan answers. “In the back of her four-year-old little brain is always the question whether we’ll be one more family who sends her away. So everything’s a test, of course, to see if she can push us to do it.”
“Oh,” says Brown, “yes, quite. I meant the nanny, what’s her name.”
“Molly.”
“Molly, right. Odd name for an African bird, isn’t it? I assume that’s what she is, African. I meant you worked it out with the child-care.”
“It’s strange,” Zan says, the train starting to move, “because we actually saw her, the afternoon before she came to the room, in a . . . peculiar way . . . at the pub where . . . wait,” he says, stepping onto the train, “what?”
“How’s that?” says Brown, walking alongside, trying to keep pace.
“I worked it out? Didn’t you work it out?”
“Uh,” the other man says, the train speeding up and leaving him behind, “you know I intended to, but . . . ”
“But I thought you arranged it,” Zan calls from the train.
“Have a good rest of your stay,” Brown calls back, waving. “Regards to Viv, if you hear from her.”
Did he say if? Over the building roar of the train, Zan strains to hear the word’s echo: Or maybe he said when. Was it when, or if? A few minutes later in their seats, Molly says, “No, it was Mrs. Nordhoc who arranged it. Sorry. I thought you understood.” On the seat beside her sits a small portable radio; a blip of music comes from its speaker. When the nanny holds the radio up to Sheba’s head, the signal comes through more clearly. In fascination Parker stares not at the effect his sister has on the transistor but the obsolete device itself. “That radio looks as old as your camera,” he murmurs before sinking back in his seat to the slight sway of the train.
Zan says to the nanny, “Viv arranged it?” Sheba is about to fall asleep, her eyes drooping. “Don’t let her fall asleep,” says Parker to Molly.
“Parker,” Zan says to the boy’s tone, but then to the woman, “I’m afraid he’s right. She’ll nap half an hour and be up the rest of the night. They’ve still got some jetlag anyway.” Molly rustles Sheba a few blinks back into consciousness, turning up the radio in the seat beside her; she moves the knob from station to station until she finds the song. Sheba’s head perks up. “Oh my god, seriously?” Parker groans from half-sleep; Sheba looks at Molly and smiles. We can be heroes just for one day. “I like this song!” says Sheba.
“I know,” Molly smiles back.
You know? thinks Zan. “You heard from Viv?”
“Well,” the nanny seems to sort through her sentences over the song, “not directly. Through a friend. A friend of a friend in Addis.” She sings softly along with Sheba and stares out the window of the train.
“But when?” says Zan.
“A few days ago, I think it was?” She says, “No, of course it must have been longer than that. A week or more?”
“A friend of a friend? Can I contact this person?”
“It’s difficult,” Molly nods, “very poor mobile service, you know, and email . . . ” and turns back to the window.
“I ask because I haven’t heard anything from her in days.”
“I am certain that she is all right,” Molly answers,
“as long as she remains in Addis Ababa.”
It may be that Zan has made an aesthetic out of coincidence, but he would find Molly’s appearance more reassuring if it somehow were more explicable. He would feel more reassured if Zan had mentioned in the email to Viv the need for a nanny before the afternoon they saw Molly outside the pub. In that case Zan can imagine scenarios, slightly far-flung though all of them are, by which a young London woman—alerted to the situation of a white foreigner in town with two kids, one a young black girl—would happen to pass by the pub and take notice. But in any case, wouldn’t Viv have written something? Maybe, as Molly indicated, Viv said something to someone in Ethiopia, who then said, Oh I know a woman in London, and then Viv forgot in the midst of everything going on. As Zan too often reminds her, sometimes she thinks of telling him something and then later remembers doing it though she hasn’t.
Zan would find Molly’s mysteriousness, and all the mysteries that her mysteriousness engenders, more purely irritating if it weren’t for the sense he has—which has grown as surely as the transmissions from Molly’s and Sheba’s bodies together—that the woman is haunted. Or she is more than haunted, she’s branded by a secret, and all that lies between her and her secret is everything about her that’s so indefinite. There’s no way for him to know if Molly has come to Sheba to try and live down this secret or to try and draw closer to a resolution; but this is the one thing about her that Zan knows is no accident, even among all his other conjectures, the most prominent of which is whether, for all concerned, hers is a secret to either be unlocked, or locked away for good.
At the hotel, he carries his daughter up to the room and lays her down in the larger bed. For a while Parker plunders cyberspace on his father’s laptop. Sheba sleeps what her brother calls the zombie sleep, eyes not fully shut, lids only half lowered; the distant music that the girl transmits rises off her sleeping body like steam off a summer sidewalk. Brushing Sheba’s hair from her eyes, Zan is reminded that he promised Viv to find a salon for her in London, and that reminds him to check his email where, after the long day, he feels certain there will be a message. When there isn’t, it’s all the more of a shock.
Zan turns from the laptop and looks at his daughter where she sleeps, noting how the girl was different today with Molly, less manic, tethered to something or someone she’s never been before. Two hours later, unaware that he’s fallen asleep, Zan wakes to the sound of weeping.
Sheba isn’t in the bed next to him. The sound of crying comes from the bathroom where the door is closed.
In the dark Zan rises from the bed, looks over at Parker, goes to the bathroom where the door is locked. “Sheba,” he calls through the door.
“Go away,” comes a little voice.
“Sheba.”
“Leave me alone.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Leave me alone.”
“What is it?”
“Leave me alone.”
“Sheba, open the door.”
For half a moment he wonders if he should leave her but he says, “Sheba. Did you have a bad dream?” She just cries. “Sheba?”
“No.”
“Did you have a bad dream?”
“No.”
“You have to let me in.”
He hears her unlock the door.
She’s sitting on the bathroom floor. Because he’s still only half conscious and his brain is full of vodka, Viv, Molly, J. Willkie Brown and Ronnie Jack Flowers, he belatedly registers that this is something new, the four-year-old sitting on the bathroom floor crying, and that this is not crying for attention, this is crying in private, the way grown-ups do when they want no one to know. She looks up at him. “You don’t love me as much as Parker,” she says simply.
“Sheba,” he says.
“You can’t.” It’s not even an accusation. It’s worse, what the girl considers a realization.
“That’s not true,” Zan says.
“You can’t,” she repeats, as though begging him just to confirm it.
“It’s not true,” he says firmly, and bends down to pick her up.
For a moment he has her, pulling her to him, when she explodes and pushes him away. “It is true! It is true! Congratulations, Parker!” she calls into the dark of the next room, “bravo! They love you more! What the hell is wrong with you people? Why did you bring me from Thyopia,” as she calls it, the only thi
ng she says now that remotely sounds like a four-year-old, “if you can’t love me as much as Parker? I want to be back in Thyopia where I was born and not here with some old family that’s just mean to me and rude. I would rather live in Thyopia for the rest of my life. Why didn’t you adopt a white daughter? This isn’t my real family, I was never in Mama’s fucked-up tummy! What the hell do you want from me? I hate you all! You don’t pay any fucked-up attention to me anyway! I know why Mama went back—to make them trade another kid for me! Some fucked-up white kid! What do you want with me anyway? I’ll put the hurt on you, young man!” she warns him. “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m a professional! You left me in the car! You can’t tell me . . . you can’t . . . ” and then, exhausted, “I’m sorry,” she begins to sob, “Poppy, I’m sorry,” pleading, “I’m only four, I’m not twelve like Parker, I act braver than I am . . . I don’t . . . ” and she speaks as though from somewhere out of time, from some vantage point out of age, seeing herself in a way that Zan never knew a four-year-old could see herself, talking about herself as Zan might or another grown up. “I’m sorry,” sobbing, “Poppy . . . ”
Zan sweeps her into his arms more determinedly than any time since he first swept her out of the backseat of the car bringing her home from the airport, and says, “Shhh, shhh, listen to me,” he clutches her to his chest and she squeezes his neck, “listen to me. Are you listening?”
A muffled reply comes from his shoulder.
“I love you. You’re my little girl. I love you and Parker the same. Mama loves you and Parker the same. You’re a member of this family and always will be. It will never, ever, ever change.”
These Dreams of You Page 10