Radiant City

by Lauren B. Davis

  Now, the time before lunch when it is quiet, it is just the three of them. Her father said he was not feeling well this morning and stayed home, which he is doing more and more these days, becoming, Saida worries, even more separated from the world. She prays Joseph is at school. Over the past several weeks, Matthew has come to be almost like a cousin, perhaps, or an in-law. His presence is a relief from being just the four of them all the time, with the same conversations, the same worries, and the same grievances against one another.

  Matthew is prone to fits of depression—Saida has noticed this, they all have. There are days when he does not come out of his apartment and then, when he does, he looks as though he has not slept, although the windows of his apartment have been shuttered. At such times Saida feeds him, for food is always good in the belly to bring the soul back to its centre, away from whatever dark place it has wandered into.

  He has told her of the book he is trying to write, and when he talks about it he laughs, as though it were a foolish thing.

  “Memory,” he said, one afternoon when they were sitting together, picking at a plate of grapes. “It’s like trying to use Medea’s cauldron. You put in an old man and think a young one will come out, but all you get is, well, something you’re ashamed of having done. It’s so easy to remember horrible things. Why is that? Why is it so hard to remember the beautiful? I wish I’d taken time to write some of those things down as I went along.”

  She had had no answer to that, because she keeps her own bad things stuffed like damp tissues in the pockets of her skirt, ready to remind her every time she unthinkingly puts in her hand.

  Saida sees a smear on the glass dome covering the plate of baklava and polishes it clear. Matthew seems all right today, his gestures less controlled than usual. His long legs are stretched out under the table, the foot not tapping. Ramzi and he look over a list Ramzi has drawn up of cities he is considering. Ramzi, in his fashionable jeans, his white shirt, his carefully blow-dried hair, is intent, chewing on the end of a pen, scratching himself behind his knee as he does when he is excited. She wonders what Ramzi would think if she suddenly pulled up a list of cities she might move to. Such a thing has never occurred to him—that, without a husband, she might decide to take Joseph and leave her father and brother behind. A daughter does not do such things. But sons do? It is hard not to hate the freedom men have.

  On the other hand, one day, possibly soon, Ramzi will come home from one of his late-night dance-club forays with a girl. Someone bright and gentle and full of smiles. Someone who will settle her brother down, anchor him. Saida smiles at the thought. She could use not only the help, but the warmth a sisterly presence would bring. More babies perhaps, in-laws, a larger life. More laughter. In Lebanon, family was the touchstone, the North Star, the centre of everything; here in the turbulent sea that is Paris they drift apart like bits of flotsam after a shipwreck.

  Her daydreams are interrupted when Matthew waves to someone outside. Saida stops polishing the glass in her hand. She hopes it is not Jack.

  A very tall black man comes through the door, shaking water droplets like a wet dog, and slaps Matthew on the back.

  “I was just going over to see you. You haven’t been round to the Bok-Bok for a while.”

  “Thought I’d give daylight a try.”

  The Bok-Bok. Saida knows, from listening to their conversations, what this word means. So, this is another of these men. Saida folds the tea towel she is holding, folds it smoothly, the edges lined up perfectly.

  Matthew introduces the man as Anthony, and he shakes hands with Ramzi. He wears a black leather jacket, with large padded shoulders. It hangs down to his knees, loose and sinister. Her brother looks so small beside these tall, giantlike men from another world. Ramzi calls for coffee.

  The man sits with his hands between his legs, the palms pressed together, his shoulders hunched, leaning forward. He bounces his head a little. When Saida brings the tray, he turns around to look at her so far that she realizes he does not see out of one eye. He pushes his chair out and starts to stand.

  “Let me give you a hand,” he says, and his accent is thick, from New York, she thinks.

  “No need.”

  “Anthony, this is Saida,” says Matthew.

  “She is my sister,” says Ramzi.

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  When she puts the tray down, he reaches out to take her hand but she jumps and quickly hides it behind her back.

  “Does that hurt?” he says.

  “Anthony, I don’t think Saida wants to talk about it.”

  “I didn’t mean anything. But, it looks like we’ve got a thing or two in common. I was hit in the head with a table. Big table, too. The corner cracked my skull right open, they said. Shattered the bones. You can see it.” He bends his head down and shows her a dented place under the curly hair. He tells her she can touch it if she wants to, but she says she does not. “It’s okay. There’s a metal plate in there now.”

  “Someone hit you with a table?”

  “Yup. Crazy guy. I used to be a cop.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. How’d you get burned?”

  Ramzi starts to say something but Saida puts up her hand. “Someone threw a pot of boiling oil at me.”

  Matthew whistles low.

  “Another crazy man, huh,” says Anthony and his face is very serious.

  “Yes. Exactly that.”

  Anthony nods. “At least you weren’t blinded. And you’re still very pretty.”

  “Thank you,” says Saida. “Drink your tea.”

  The man smiles at her, and for a moment, she sees something under the smile, a struggle of some sort.

  “Must be hard not to be angry,” he says.

  “Some days it is very hard.”

  He nods. “I agree.” He pats his head, and she notices there is some grey in his hair. “I can cook. I’m an excellent cook,” he says. A statement of fact with no conceit in it. “Maybe sometime I could come by here and help you in the kitchen. Not for any pay, but to learn how to cook Lebanese. What do you think?”

  “He’s a terrific cook,” says Matthew.

  She tries to picture him in the tiny alcove kitchen with her. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

  “I wouldn’t be in the way. Just be your sous-chef.” He holds his pale-palmed hands wide and grins. It is as hard not to like this man as it is to like the other.

  “Maybe.”

  As she turns to go he says, “Hey, you’re Joseph’s mother, right?”

  “That’s right,” she says.

  “Yeah, Jack told me about him. He really likes your son.”

  Matthew puts his hand on Anthony’s arm. “Jack said that?”

  “Yeah. Jack said Joseph took him down to see some place in Barbès—some Moroccan couscous place. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t,” says Matthew.

  “Oh. That’s right. I guess you haven’t seen Jack if you haven’t been down to the Bok.”

  “I didn’t know that either.” Something cold, glassy and serpentine stirs in Saida’s stomach. “Did you know this, Ramzi?”

  “Maybe I knew he had Jack’s phone number. The rest I didn’t know.”

  Anthony looks at her and says, “You don’t have to worry if your kid’s with Jack. He’s a very protective guy. He knows how to take care of situations.”

  The problem is, of course, that Saida does not want her son in situations that need taking care of.

  “Did I say something wrong?” he says to Matthew as Saida turns away.

  She stands in the kitchen alcove and chops parsley. She presses the back of the blade with her left hand and levers the handle down rapidly, harshly, as though she wants to cut right through the wooden block beneath. She pretends she cannot hear them.

  “It’s not your fault,” says Ramzi. “She gets upset, my sister.”

  “She doesn’t want her son around Jack?”

  “I gue
ss he’s having some trouble in school. He’s hanging around with some guys his mother’s not real fond of,” says Matthew.

  “Oh.”

  “It’s okay,” says Ramzi. “Joseph is a good boy.”

  Saida looks over at Matthew then, and finds his eyes waiting for hers.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he says.

  She wants very much for this to be true.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Anthony and Matthew leave the café.

  “So, where you headed, Anthony?” asks Matthew.

  “I came to get you. Jack tried to call, but you didn’t answer, so I said I’d come by to see if you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine. Came to get me for what?”

  “Graveyard visitation. Come with us. It’ll cheer you up.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all. Death is good for the soul.”

  Matthew laughs. “Who’s going?”

  “Paweena and me, Jack and Suzi. We’ll meet at the Passy Cemetery about three?”

  “What’s at the Passy Cemetery?”

  “There’s this great mausoleum. A Russian guy. You have to see it. Jack wants to take photos. So, come with us.”

  “Why not?”

  “Okay. I’ll see you then. I got to go meet Paweena at the Monoprix. She needs a new blender or something.”

  “Anthony, you’re spending a lot of money on this girl, aren’t you?”

  Anthony puts his hands in his pockets and looks at his feet, turning them pigeon-toed first, and then pivoting on his heels so his toes turn out. When he looks up again, his face is serious. “Listen. I know Paweena’s game. Don’t think I don’t. Like I said the first time we met, that whack on the skull may have knocked loose a few directional signals, but the engine still runs just fine, you understand?” Matthew begins to protest, but Anthony stops him. “It’s all right. But you have to know where she’s from, the sorts of things that have happened to her. Money changing hands means she’s in control, and that feels safe for her. It doesn’t matter to me. Man, look—you got some, you got none, you got a little, you got a lot. Sometimes you got to gorge yourself to see it isn’t really the belly that’s hungry at all, you know? Besides, she can ask all she wants, don’t mean I buy her everything, you know?”

  “Fair enough. Didn’t mean to stick my nose in. Paweena’s a lucky girl.”

  “Hell, yes, man. I am a catch!” Anthony punches him lightly on the shoulder, grins and heads down the street, saying he’ll see Matthew later.

  When Matthew walks into the apartment, the phone is ringing. It’s Jack. Matthew tells him he has already spoken to Anthony.

  “Tell you what, come by my place first and we’ll take the subway together.”

  “Isn’t that sort of backward? Don’t you live over in the eleventh?” Matthew says.

  “Come on. You can get on the metro at Europe and get off at Saint-Maur. One line. There’s a great cheap Cambodian place around the corner, and then we can grab the nine line right back to Trocadéro. We can have a talk without the gaggle around.”

  Although this sounds like an extravagantly convoluted path, Matthew agrees, lured in part by curiosity about how Jack lives. All of their previous meetings out in the field have been on the temporary neutral ground of hotels and rented rooms.

  The apartment is on Saint-Maur, a busy street made recently trendy by the relatively cheap rents and the resulting influx of those who call themselves artists. Across the street is an Arab bakery where a line of people wait to get in. Flaky date-filled morsels and assortments of pastries sprinkled with pale green pistachio nuts and almonds and sesame seeds fill the window. Saida comes to mind, as she had looked that morning, with a smear of icing sugar across her forehead. There are three cafés on the corner, all jammed with young customers, a sea of Marlborough cigarettes, colourful headscarves, dirty-blond dreadlocks and casual fashion that takes a significant amount of thought to achieve.

  Matthew punches the security code into the metal pad on the wall, waits for the click and then swings open the heavy door. Inside, the entrance is littered with junk-mail flyers. The sound of someone’s music, the bass far too loud, drifts down the stairwell. Through a doorway at the back he sees a minute courtyard, more of an airshaft, with a few dying plants in pots struggling toward the overcast sky. It smells of cat piss and old, mouldering plaster. He begins to climb the stairs and trips on the uneven, sloping second step. The handrail is sticky beneath his palm. He searches for the light switch, but when he finds it and presses, nothing happens.

  As he passes the second floor the smell of marijuana drifts from the same bright blue door that hides the music source. Some sort of New World African—Cuban mix, overlaid by techno-bass. The floor shakes slightly in rhythmic response. On the third floor a baby cries, and Matthew notices a few more dead plants, geraniums, forgotten on a grimy windowsill. The wooden floors are wide-planked and shiny from centuries of feet. Here and there a nail rises up to snag an unwary boot. On the fourth floor there is silence, more sinister than the thoughtless noise, and Matthew imagines eyes pressed to peepholes and cracks in the wood. The sixth floor is where, in considerably better days, servants would have been housed. There are two doors, and a hall leading to more. To the left of the stairwell is a door with glass panels, one cracked and held together with electrical tape. Matthew knocks.

  There is a shuffle inside and then the door opens. Jack fills the space completely.

  “Come on in,” he says.

  The room is tiny and the door can’t be opened all the way because of the wooden chair behind it. To the right is a single bed, with two shelves above filled with folded black T-shirts, jeans, a sweater and two shirts. At the end of the bed is a footlocker, atop which sits Jack’s camera. To the left, next to the chair, is a square table on which sits a transistor radio, a copy of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, an old copy of Penthouse, an overflowing ashtray, a plate with half a baguette and some cheese, and several packages of Camel cigarettes. Matthew notices a couple of hand-rolled butts in the ashtray, which account for the lingering aroma of marijuana. At the end of the room is a washstand with a sink, a hotplate and a cupboard beneath. There is no window; the only light comes from a bulb in the ceiling that has an imitation Japanese shade with a calligraphy symbol drawn on it in black ink. It throws a strange and unsettling shadow, as though a huge moth rests against the bulb.

  Apart from its size, and the lack of natural light, what is unusual about the room is that, except for the overflowing ashtray, everything is impeccably, institutionally, neat. The bed looks like it has been made by a four-star general, the blanket and sheet so tight there is no doubt a dime would bounce to the ceiling. The clothes are folded and their edges aligned. A few clean dishes stand neatly stacked next to the minuscule sink. Three cereal boxes and a box of rice, arranged smallest to largest, are lined up like nutritional soldiers.

  Matthew thinks of his own impossibly messy kitchen and shudders.

  “You’ve got this place shipshape.”

  “I like to have things tidy. When you’re my size you can’t have a lot of clutter,” says Jack, and there is something in his voice, as though he has been looking for approval, as though this were an inspection. “Hey, it’s not much, but it’s cheap.”

  “It’s great.”

  “Yeah. A real château. You want a drink?”

  “No. Too early, at least for today.”

  “Coffee?” Jack goes back to the sink and pulls out a pot from the cupboard beneath the hotplate. “I can boil water.”

  “Well, if you want one. Sure.”

  Matthew sits on the chair, wedged between the wall and the table, facing the bed. There isn’t enough room to swing his legs under the table.

  “Turn on the radio if you want,” says Jack as he lights the gas burner.

  The radio is tuned to a jazz station and the sounds of Coltrane’s “Lush Life” waft into the room. Jack spoons instant coffee into two thick,
white mugs.

  “So, you looking forward to our journey into the city of the dead?” Matthew says.

  “It’s all right. Something to do,” says Jack, giving voice to Matthew’s own opinion.

  Jack carries the coffee over and sets the mugs down in front of them. “You want milk?” Matthew says black is fine and Jack sits on the bed, his back ramrod straight. They talk about Jack’s neighbours, old men mostly, and a couple of Filipina cleaning ladies who live together and avert their eyes whenever he passes them in the hall. “Like they’re scared of me,” Jack says, and chuckles.

  Matthew finds it hard to relax in the room, and it dawns on him that it is as if they are sitting in a military prison cell. When Jack suggests they should get going if they want to eat, he feels nothing but relief.

  At the Cambodian restaurant they eat ginger port with peanuts and cambogee beef. The only occidentals in the place, they sit on narrow benches and hunch over the bowls of steaming meat and rice. They drink beer and smile at the faces around them.

  “I love this stuff,” says Jack, shovelling it in.

  When they finish they drink tea from small fragile cups with no handles.

  “I hear Suzi’s coming this afternoon,” Matthew says. “So, you guys an item?”

  “I don’t know. She’s all right. Smart, you know. Smarter than you’d think.”

  “I wouldn’t think anything.”

  “Well, most hookers aren’t smart. They’re stupid or they wouldn’t be in that job in the first place. I mean, they all think they’re smart because they’re getting the money, right, they think that’s power. But it’s not. That’s just a pimp’s con. Telling a woman how she can live off her womanhood and all that shit.”

  “Sounds like you’ve given it some thought.”

  Jack laughs. “Well, let’s just say there was a time when a couple of girls didn’t seem to mind making sure my rent was paid, know what I mean?”