What I want to tell you, Gussie says, is that you will surprise yourself with what you feel later on. You don’t know. That’s one of the things marriage does to you.
And then it’s the day of the party. The guests are Hal and Gussie’s neighbors in the community, acquaintances from the club. They are strangers to us, and really they are strangers even to Hal and Gussie, people they have met once or twice. Only a few people come in from L.A.
We are congratulated. I am congratulated. It is the only thing people have to say to me. My accomplishment is marriage, the promise of marriage. I take questions about the venue, the food, the dress, the hair, the honeymoon. No one asks how we met. Everyone has advice, predictions.
You are going to look gorgeous in that dress, a woman says to me. She is the nth wife of a retired financier. Her teeth are like Formica.
You are going to have such a beautiful wedding, she says. She is like an oracle: she is so confident of what I am going to have.
No one asks what I do. It is assumed that what I do is marry.
One of the brothers’ wives catches me. She says how wonderful the party is, the crowd. She is so kind. His family is so kind. You’re glowing, she says.
I say, Isn’t it pregnant women who glow?
Every time I look up, no matter where I am standing, he is on the opposite side of the yard. But I am never without company; I am always in a group of three or four. Strangers hug me—everyone hugs me. I am common property; fair game. Meeting so many unfamiliar people at once gives me an unsettled feeling, a sense of being out of place. In New York, we share the same friends, the same social world. I know his people, he knows mine. Here, in a city I’m visiting for the first time, buffeted by strangers, I feel like a woman entering an arranged marriage, not marrying for love, not marrying a man I know well, whose life is already my life. Someone new approaches, arms out. The bride, he says.
The fireworks begin just after dark. Everyone looks up, toward the Strip. Explosions bloom over the desert, neon palm trees, glazing the white skin of faces in a pink and green light. I feel the concussions in the bottom of my throat. Even miles away I smell sulfur and chemicals.
Independence Day. It is not a holiday I have strong emotions for. A nation’s birthday seems as silly to me as a nation’s feelings, a nation’s relationship status. I catch sight of the three-year-old: he is enchanted. Holidays become meaningful or not during childhood. I have only a pleasant memory of summer nights, a field at dusk, the warm, gummy air.
While people are still distracted by the show, I slip away, into the house. It is cool, dark, silent. There is a back room they don’t use, filled with boxes of stuff, forgotten things, photographs, old paperwork, school assignments—drawings, writing graded with stickers. Hal and Gussie dumped this stuff here when they arrived. Miscellaneous junk. Kid junk. It is a room out of mind. Some of the boxes aren’t sealed. There is no organization. One of the first things I find is an essay he wrote in elementary school, printed in dot matrix, on the history of the machine gun: what ten-year-old child writes about the development of military technology? Would he even remember writing it? I set it aside. I continue searching.
I don’t know how long I’ve been gone from the party. Who finds me? Gussie.
Hal wanted to throw it all away, but I couldn’t, she says.
She picks up the essay her son wrote on the history of the machine gun; she turns a page. She says, I remember this: he was fascinated by this. She laughs.
Boys, she says.
People in the yard are clapping: the show is over. We return to the party. I lose Gussie in the crowd. She hugs me before going. I don’t know what the hug means; but it is something beyond the affection she has shown me previously. She is not a stranger. She will become the member of his family I am most fond of. I will tell her things I don’t tell my husband; I will tell her things about my husband. She will become more familiar to me and also more mysterious. But we won’t speak again about what happened between her and Hal. I won’t know fully the contours of her decision. I won’t ask the question I want to ask her: What was it like to give your life to your children? I will always wonder about Hal, whether moving away from L.A. really closed the matter with the other woman. There is a kind of ease you can buy and a kind of ease you can’t. I only know the future I know.
I find him outside, in the yard, and take his hand. I was just reading your latest thinking on machine guns, I say. In another town, farther out, fireworks are still exploding, a distant, vaporous glow over the desert. Later, the subject of children will come up again, and I will say, I don’t know. It was something I felt strongly about when I was younger, I will say. We’re still young, he will say, even though we will be older than we are now. Children are a decision society makes for you, I will say. He will say, Please don’t use the phrase “capitalist imperative” when we’re talking about this. We will have many conversations, over years, about this question. Some will be painful. I don’t know this now. I don’t know how young I am. I don’t know what will change and what won’t. I don’t want this to be the only important thing, I will say. But it is an important thing, he will say. I say, will say, I love you.
PROTO-ROMANCE
Elizabeth Bishop, a person I admire, once lived in Brazil. She wrote a book about the country for the Life World Library. She fought with the publisher over points of style, and complained theatrically about it in letters to Robert Lowell. In the book, her affection for Brazil is plainly in evidence, as well as an eye for its excesses and injustices. “It seems that there should be a revolution every month or so,” she wrote. You have to be an outsider, sometimes, to see things as they are. But you have to be the kind of outsider who drinks the liquor and sleeps with the locals. She lived there twenty years, more or less, and did both.
She personally knew Clarice Lispector. “I suppose we are getting to be ‘friends,’” she wrote to Robert Lowell. “Her novels are NOT good.” Writers. The life made of art, and all that.
“Oh, tourist,” she wrote, in another context. By her own estimation, she spoke Portuguese “like a dog.” Some comfort in that, I suppose.
Marcos started sending me texts. I failed to inform my husband of the texts, which at first didn’t seem grievous; and then it did, and then Marcos suggested we meet. I asked what he had in mind. He wrote back: “Lunch, kisses.” Brazilians often signed off with “beijos,” but Marcos wrote the word in English. It altered the implication. He knew what he was doing.
Our rendezvous was set for an Italian restaurant, just off Avenida Faria Lima. Men in suits emerged from cars with the luxury items they were dating and handed the keys to valets, who ran here and there in sharp, practiced lines, like ball boys between points of a tennis match. I stepped inside and breathed cool, expensive air.
“This is where São Paulo businessmen bring their girlfriends,” Marcos said between touching my hip and kissing my cheek. I saw a young woman with a man who was more than trivially older. “So this is where you can see them in the wild,” I said. Marcos flicked his fingers in the direction of the waiter, and a moment later we had wine.
I could have said this was an English lesson over lunch. I didn’t expect to be questioned, but it was good to have a way of explaining the situation, to myself, among others.
Trying to think of things I didn’t know about him, I asked what Marcos’s parents did for a living.
“They own property,” he said.
“And Iara’s?”
It seemed polite to acknowledge the fact of his wife.
“Supermarkets.”
Marcos named an expensive chain where I bought French butter and almond milk. He dipped a piece of fresh bread into the dish of olive oil on the table between us. As he chewed, he made a face of uncomplicated pleasure.
I said, “Can you tell me what my husband does?”
“Do you mean with other women?”
I wasn’t expecting that.
I said, “I mean actually what he
does. His day. His job. I’ve never understood the nature of his work.”
Marcos dipped his bread again. More pleasure.
I said, “People ask me what my husband does. I act as though it’s inherently difficult to understand, that the fault isn’t mine, but I’m not an idiot. I could understand it if I wanted to. The truth is, I’ve never bothered to learn about his work. I’ve never paid attention. I don’t ask. The work he does—the work all of you do—bores me to death.”
He laughed and clutched at his heart as if I had reached across the table and lanced him with my salad fork. He really was quite handsome. When he was finished with this performance, he leaned across the table so that his nose was almost touching mine.
He said, “So tell me something that does not bore you.”
“Etymology,” I said.
Success—a word he didn’t know. It didn’t seem like cheating; the word for etymology in Portuguese is a cognate. From the Latin: cognatus, “of common descent.” He was unprepared for my style of flirtation.
Was I flirting? I wasn’t not. You can call almost anything flirting, though, just like you can call almost anyone a friend.
Here’s a tip, from my stint as a single woman in New York: if you’re going to flirt with someone reading a book by herself, you’d better be ready to talk about the book. She’ll be less than impressed if you ask her what she’s reading and then stare like an idiot when she says Coetzee.
I saw another protest march on TV. It was on Avenida Paulista, the Museum of Art, a Sunday afternoon. The museum is an enormous, elevated concrete shoebox standing on red concrete stilts, whose primary architectural advantage is to give the titillating impression that one day it will collapse and kill everyone standing beneath it. The building was conceived by Lina Bo Bardi, Brazil’s famous woman architect. Elizabeth Bishop’s lover during her time in Brazil was also a woman architect, but she was famous more for being Elizabeth Bishop’s lover than for being an architect. And for killing herself—pills, New York.
I wondered if Iara was at this protest. I had thought of calling her since having lunch with her husband, but always stopped myself. I didn’t call because I didn’t know what I would say. Telling her about Marcos seemed impossible, but speaking to her without telling her seemed impossible as well. Finally, I sent her a text message saying that I hoped her daughters were well, and she replied with a picture of the two of them dressed as princesses. I asked if she was going to the protest. There was a long delay before she responded. “What protest?” she wrote.
The protestors gathered under the Museum of Art and also in the avenue. Traffic was defeated in both directions. Already it was becoming corporate, co-opted; there were celebrities and local politicians on a dais, making speeches, polishing their brands. The police looked calm; they were getting the hang of it. So were the vendors. They sold vuvuzelas, Brazilian flags, tee shirts with slogans. The protestors were dressed in Brazilian national jerseys as if going to a soccer match. The vendors were dressed in jerseys, too, and they walked through the crowds, calling out what they had for sale, monetizing outrage. The weather was nice. I saw a sign in English: “Brazil is being raped by corruption.” Signs in English? The intended audience wasn’t Brazilian. The audience was CNN.
Change—after all this time no one had a better explanation for what the protestors wanted. But who doesn’t want change? My husband was right: it’s meaningless to demand only change. Everyone wants x but eventually finds herself wanting y, and then, before long, z.
“No one thinks it’s going to go any further. The company’s too big for this to become more serious than it has to be.”
“So they were stealing.”
“They were stealing so that they could pay bribes to politicians who would allow them to continue making money so that they could continue stealing and thus continue paying bribes.”
“Is your bank going to lose money?”
“We have a position in the company. We’re somewhat exposed. We’re waiting on the outcome of the investigation.”
“Right now it sounds like you’re reading from your talking points.”
“It’s a global investment bank. We have talking points.”
“You do?”
“Yes, we do.”
“So tell me something that isn’t a talking point.”
“The politicians take bribes so they can finance election campaigns and remain in office so they can continue collecting bribes to finance more campaigns. The companies have internal divisions specifically devoted to processing the payment of bribes.”
“No wonder people are protesting. The party in power is the party that does this?”
“Whatever party is in power is the party that does this. All the politicians from all the parties do this. When they’re in power, they steal, and when they’re out of power they open investigations.”
People sent e-mails. They asked about Brazil, about my life in Brazil. Sometimes I answered. I wrote about restaurants, about the tasting menus and the wine pairings. I wrote about what I knew of the country’s politics. The president’s popularity was in free fall, the elections were a year away. The party depended on the poor for votes. People asked about the protests. They’d read stories in the New York Times. It was the only thing they knew about what was happening in Brazil. I wrote about traffic and crime. In one e-mail, I described an exhibition of photographs at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The photographer was a German Jew who had left Berlin in 1939 and landed in São Paulo. He became successful as a commercial photographer and made beautiful black-and-white images of industrial plants, Mercedes-Benz dealerships, adding machines. The exhibition included some of his early work. Before leaving Berlin, the photographer, when he knew he had no choice but to go into exile, took pictures of the lampposts and streetlights. This made perfect sense to me.
I saw the prostitute who lived in her car. I hadn’t seen her in a while. I’m sick, she said. I offered her some money. I’m leaving here, I’m going home, she said. I asked where home was. I’m going home to die, she said.
My husband’s hours at work grew even longer, and when he finally came home, the situation there lingered as a source of anxiety. I asked him about it. “Market conditions,” he said. I asked what he meant. “I mean the way of doing business here,” he said. “I’m tired,” he said. “This fucking place,” he said.
Hannah said, “Emmanuel came back from the American consulate this morning. He was so upset. ‘They say I am not qualified!’ He paid one hundred sixty dollars for a three-minute interview. He told the consular officer where he works, how long he’s been in Brazil, how much money he makes, where his family is. And then he said he wanted to visit Disney for a week. Disney, because he knows that’s what the Brazilians say. And I said, ‘You’re telling them you want to go for tourism, but you’re obviously not a tourist, of course you didn’t get a visa.’ I realized that I sounded just like the consular officer. I felt awful. He said, ‘So how am I supposed to go?’”
“He seemed to think the decision would be overturned if he could get me to say he was qualified for the visa. People always plead their case with you after the fact, even though you can’t do anything about it. Everyone just wants somebody else to say he’s right. Mackenson, Nadège, Frantz, Robenson, Cassandra, Wilguens, Mardochée—they all go to the consulate to be refused. The irony is that they have a better deal here than they would in America. They get papers here. They get health care. They must know it’s hopeless. But they go anyway. They save up their hundred sixty dollars and they go. They can’t even say why they want to go to America. They just want to go. Somehow they still believe in it, the myth, streets paved with gold.”
“I get it. It’s arbitrary that I was born in a rich country and they were born in a poor country. It’s not fair. Americans don’t try to sneak into Haiti. So I get it. Being at the bottom in America is a hundred times better than being at the bottom in Brazil, a thousand times better than being at the bottom in Hai
ti. I get it. But if you opened the borders, you would have literally half a billion people trying to get into the country. Is there a single person in Haiti who wouldn’t come to America? These guys have a good situation in Brazil, and yet instead of making a life here, they’re trying to get to America. Once upon a time I would have read about Haitian immigrants and I would have wanted to help them all. I would have been so angry at the politicians who want to keep everybody out. And now—but I get it. Fuck. I feel like that Republican senator who found out his son was gay and suddenly had to be O.K. with gay marriage.”
Hannah would leave Brazil soon and return to Los Angeles. She had a dissertation to write and a C.V. to monetize. She had parents who wanted to see their daughter. We were in the church kitchen, where we often were when we talked about the men and women we helped, or tried to help. I had never seen Hannah like this. I thought of her as a young woman, though she was, in fact, a bit older than I.
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