The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  “You should train for one of the caring professions,” her father told her. “Nursing or something like that. You’re a nurturer.”

  It had not escaped Karla that being a nurturer occupied a very low rung on her parents’ hierarchy of valuable life pursuits. And she had doubted in any case that she deserved the designation. Beneath her placid exterior, it seemed to her, she harbored a lot of distinctly unnurturing emotions. Rage. Frustration. The not infrequent desire to smack her mother in the face. The argument, such as it was, for her compassionate nature rested on nothing more substantial than a childhood incident in which she had brought home an injured bird. (The bird had later died of starvation while in her care.)

  Still, she had been at an age when to be crisply summed up in any manner was vaguely flattering, and whatever misgivings she had about her father’s account of her were outweighed by the potent pleasure of finding herself the object of his scrutiny. Now, sixteen years on, the idea of her caring instinct had become so fixed a component of family lore—so central to the world’s understanding of who she was—that she had long since ceased to question its accuracy. Only very occasionally—when some well-meaning person like Khaled was confidently assuring her of her kind and gentle disposition—did she experience a twinge of long-forgotten doubt and a dim resurgence of anger at her vocational doom.

  “Wait,” Khaled said, “is that all you are having for your lunch?”

  Karla looked up to see him pointing at her tub of cottage cheese. “Yes,” she said. “There’s a lot in here.”

  “Nooo. It isn’t enough! You will be hungry again in an hour.”

  “Honestly, I’m good.”

  He shook his head. “You must have some of mine. I have too much for one person.”

  Karla’s refusal grew slightly desperate. “Thank you, but really, I don’t like a big meal at lunchtime.” She resumed eating, spooning the cottage cheese into her mouth in a rapid, anxious motion, as if she were expecting at any moment to be struck.

  Khaled took a forkful of his rice and chewed it slowly. “May I ask you…are you on a diet?”

  “Me?” Karla gestured comically at her own bulk. “Does it look like it?”

  He looked at her with concern. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I have offended you.”

  Karla tried to give herself some time by pretending that her mouth was full. “No, not at all,” she said, after a moment. But as she spoke, a large hot tear plopped into her cottage cheese.

  “Oh, my God,” Khaled cried. “I am a stupid person. I didn’t mean to…”

  “Please,” Karla said. “It’s all right.” She wanted to hit him.

  “But I have upset you.” Khaled put his food down and pressed his fingers against his shining temples.

  “It’s not your fault,” Karla said. “It’s nothing to do with you. It’s…it’s something else. Something private. I’m sorry to have spoiled your lunch.”

  Tears were coursing down her cheeks now. She put the lid back on her cottage cheese, placed the container in her handbag and stood up. Glancing down, she saw that her buttocks had left two large oval depressions in the lining of Khaled’s jacket.

  “Don’t go,” he said.

  She could no longer speak. Shaking her head, she walked quickly away across the grass.

  In the restroom off the hospital lobby, she took a long, punitive look at her reflection in the mirror. Her nose was swollen and glowing, a jokestore accessory. Her blouse had ridden up, revealing several intersecting lines of pink and white crenellation where her waistband cut into her belly. She let out a small groan of despair. She had cried—cried about being fat—in front of a stranger. Two women came in now and broke off from their chatter to register her distraught appearance. She walked quickly into one of the stalls and stayed there, listening to the slam of stall doors and the roar of hand-dryers, until the women had left. Then she came out again, splashed her face with cold water, and went back upstairs to her office.

  She was intending to get some work done, but as soon as she sat down at her desk, she discovered that her computer screen had frozen. She jabbed at various keys for a while and then began to whack the side of the computer with her fist.

  “Temper, temper,” a voice drawled behind her.

  She turned to see one of the hospital porters standing in the doorway. “Oh! Hi, Ray.”

  He gave a lugubrious chuckle. “Busy, are you?”

  “A bit.”

  Ray was a squat, indolent man in his early sixties. His heavy style of campy, knowing pessimism made him deeply unpopular among his colleagues at the hospital. Karla, attuned to the high, mosquito whine of his neediness, always felt obliged to be especially nice to him.

  “I heard you got in a little trouble this morning,” Ray said. “Some fella on the fifth floor tried to rape you.”

  “No, no, it was—”

  “Ooh, how awful. They should pay you danger money.”

  Karla disliked receiving visitors in her office. The cubicle was hardly large enough to accommodate one person; two people within its doll-size confines were forced into a physical intimacy bordering on the indecent. Ray was so near to Karla now that she could see the rheum in the corners of his eyes and the scurf in his ear. Subtly, so as not to offend him, she leaned away, pressing her head against a filing cabinet.

  “Must be a full moon,” Ray went on. “They’ve all been acting up lately. Some nutter on the third floor threw his lunch down the toilet and caused a flood yesterday…it was like a third-world country in there. I told them, it’ll be a miracle if we don’t all get dysentery.”

  “Oh, dear,” Karla said.

  “Yeah, well, same old same old…. What’s wrong with your computer, then?”

  “Frozen. I should call IT.”

  “Oof.” He rolled his eyes. “Good luck. You’ll be waiting a while before any of them get down here. They’re all too busy sitting up there playing poker…”

  Through the triangular space between Ray’s torso and his bent arm, Khaled’s face suddenly appeared. “Sorry,” he said, “am I interrupting?”

  Ray turned to him with a sardonic stare. “You want to talk to Karla, do you?”

  “Only if it’s convenient….”

  “Don’t mind me. I should go, anyway.” He gave Karla an arch look. “I’ll leave the two of you alone. See you later, Karla.”

  “Bye, Ray.” Karla watched helplessly as Ray lumbered off down the corridor.

  “I hope I didn’t intrude,” Khaled said. “I came to apologize for upsetting you just now.”

  “You didn’t have to,” she replied curtly. “I’m fine.” There was something almost sadistic in this man’s pursuit of her, she thought. What was wrong with him?

  “I feel very bad,” Khaled said. “You just had this terrible thing happen with the boy, and now I said something stupid to hurt your feelings…”

  “Honestly, it was nothing. I’m just in a weird mood today. It wasn’t anything you did.”

  He bent down and took out a packet of M&Ms from his briefcase. “I brought you these.”

  “Oh, no!” Karla said. “Really…” The tactlessness of the offering astonished her. Was this the only gesture of propitiation he could think of? Did gluttony so override all her other discernible qualities?

  “Please,” Khaled said. “If you don’t take them, I’ll know you are still angry.”

  He sounded so sincerely unhappy that for a moment Karla forgot her dignity and the tragedy of her fatness. “Okay,” she said, taking the bag of candy from him and setting it down on her desk. “Thank you very much.”

  “We are friends again?”

  Karla nodded. “Of course. We were never not friends.”

  “And you accept my apology?”

  “Sure.”

  Khaled glanced around the cubicle. “So. This is where you work.” He pointed to a photograph of Mike and Karla on her corkboard. “Is that your boyfriend?”

  “Husband,” Karla corrected. S
he looked at the photograph. It had been taken at a union party seven years ago, shortly after she and Mike had begun dating. Mike was squinting coolly at the camera with a can of beer in his hands. She—fresh off a diet of cabbage soup and laxatives—was wearing size 10 jeans and flashing a peace sign. She could still remember the excitement of that night: the dazed elation she had felt at being out in public on Mike’s arm. Mike had been one of the union’s most eligible bachelors in those days. The nurses used to grow flustered and giggly at the sight of him swaggering down the hospital corridors with a toothpick clenched between his teeth. Women in the union offices would stare at his butt and exchange significant looks when he passed their desks.

  Everyone had been astonished when he decided to take a romantic interest in Karla—Karla perhaps most of all. She had spent much of their early courtship half expecting to discover that she had been made the victim of an elaborate practical joke. Mike had always been very sweet and reassuring about her lack of obvious qualifications to be his girlfriend. There might be prettier women, he told her—prettier women and wittier women and women with better bodies. But he didn’t care about superficial things like that. He was looking for someone he could talk to, someone who understood his values and commitments. Someone he could respect. And Karla, caught up in the delirium of her unsought-for, undreamed-of privilege, had believed this to be the sweetest thing any man had ever said to her.

  “Is he a fun person?” Khaled asked.

  “Yes,” Karla said quickly. “Very.”

  “You have children?”

  She stiffened. “No…not yet. We’re…trying.”

  “Ah. That’s nice. Children are nice. I spend a lot of time with my nephews. My brother and his family live near me, so I often take the boys out to McDonald’s and whatever.” He pointed at her messy desk. “You work very hard, I can see.”

  Karla shook her head in modest demurral. “Not so hard.”

  “Yes, you do. I see what time people leave this place, and you are always working late.”

  Karla gave a nervous laugh, unsure whether to be flattered or spooked that he observed her comings and goings. “Well, I’m not working very hard now,” she said. “My computer’s frozen. I was about to call IT.”

  “I know a bit about computers. Would you like me to take a look?”

  “No, thanks. I really should—”

  “But it may be something quite simple. Let me try.”

  Reluctantly, Karla got up and squeezed herself against the wall to let Khaled sit down.

  “I think we have to restart it,” he said.

  Karla gazed at his bald spot dubiously. “Have you studied computers, then?’”

  “No, I just spend a lot of time on mine. The Internet and all that. I am single, you see. It’s a good way for me to make friends.”

  Karla felt a little oppressed by this unsolicited glimpse into his lonely private life. Did he use the Internet dating services, she wondered? Or the pornography sites?

  Khaled turned to her suddenly. “I don’t look at dirty pictures or anything like that. I wouldn’t want you to think…”

  Karla blushed. “No, of course not.”

  After a few moments, he sat back. “Well, that was easy.”

  “Really? Is it working again?”

  “All I did was restart it. Sometimes that’s all it needs.”

  Karla came and peered at the screen. “Wow. Thanks.”

  He stood up. “I guess I should leave you in peace now.”

  “Well, I should be getting on.”

  “Do you think we could have our lunch together again sometime? I promise not to upset you again.”

  Karla smiled. “Okay.”

  “Great!” He picked up his briefcase. “We will talk next week.”

  As soon as he had closed the door, Karla reached for the packet of M&Ms and tore it open. What an odd man he was! What questions he asked! She tipped back her head to receive the rattling candy into her mouth. He was kind, in his clumsy way. And clearly not a dummy. You could tell just by the way he had mimicked that nurse that he got things. She probed with her tongue at a little piece of M&M that had become stuck in one of her molars. Had he meant it, about their having lunch again? Half of her hoped that he hadn’t. It would be a relief not to have to endure the tension of another encounter. The other half wanted him to have been in earnest—if only, she told herself, so she might correct the awful first impression she had made.

  CHAPTER

  8

  “Lenny, have you seen my bag?”

  Audrey stood at the foot of the stairs, waiting for a response. A few seconds later, she shouted again. “Lenny?”

  “Yeah?” a groggy voice came back.

  “Have you seen my bag?”

  “No.”

  “Well, get a move on. We have to be off in a minute.”

  Audrey and Lenny were going this morning to see Lenny’s mother at the Bedford Correctional Facility in Westchester. Visiting Susan was a chore that Audrey generally tried to avoid, but Lenny had been without a license since his last DUI conviction, and if she didn’t drive him today, he would be forced to take the nasty prison bus. As she wandered into the kitchen, the phone rang.

  “Hiya, Audrey,” Daniel chirruped.

  “Oh, it’s you,” Audrey replied. “I’d forgotten you existed.”

  Daniel was now working at a downtown law firm specializing in environmental law. He had not been to see Joel in several weeks.

  “Well, I’m still here,” he said.

  “Saved any whales lately?”

  He made a desultory sound of amusement. “No, not yet. How are you, Audrey?”

  “Tickety-boo, thank you. Is there any reason for this call?”

  “I was wondering if I could arrange a time to come and see you, actually.”

  “What for?”

  “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “What?

  “I’d rather not mention it on the phone.”

  Audrey gave a mocking laugh. Daniel was always being gratuitously mysterious about utterly unimportant things. It was one of the many ways in which he tried to make himself seem important.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Daniel,” she said. “Just tell me.”

  Lenny entered the kitchen, holding her bag. She made an astounded, where-on-earth-did-you-find-it? face and blew him a kiss.

  “It really wouldn’t be appropriate, Audrey,” Daniel was saying. “It’s something that needs to be discussed in person. It is quite urgent, though, so if you could make time to see me today—”

  “I can’t,” Audrey said. “I’m going up to Bedford to take Lenny to see his mother.”

  “What time do you expect to be back?”

  “Bloody hell, Daniel, can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “Today really would be better.”

  Audrey grunted in irritation. “All right, I’ll meet you here at five.”

  She hung up and turned to Lenny. “You clever boy! Where was it?”

  “On the landing.”

  “Really? How weird! Are you ready to go, then?

  “Yeah.”

  She looked him up and down. “I don’t suppose you want to shave?”

  Lenny gave his chin an exploratory rub. “Nah.”

  On their way out of the city, they stopped to get gas. Audrey sent Lenny in to pay while she pumped. When he returned, she found that he had used her change to purchase a Gatorade and a hot dog the color of doll flesh.

  “Why didn’t you wait?” she asked as they got back into the car. “I would have stopped somewhere decent if I’d known you were hungry.”

  “Yeah, but I was starving,” Lenny said. “I didn’t have anything for dinner last night.”

  Audrey glanced at him as she steered the car back onto Houston Street. “Why not, you silly?”

  Lenny bit into his hot dog. “No money.”

  “Oh, Lenny.” For the last three months Audrey had been giving Lenny an allowance of a
hundred dollars a week. This, together with some odd jobs that he was doing for Jean and other friends, was meant to tide him over until he could find full-time work.

  “I feel really shitty about it, Mom,” Lenny said. “But I had to give Tanya back the money I owed her. And then I’ve been having to pay all these taxi fares to go and see Dad and—”

  “Taxis!” Audrey exclaimed. “Lenny, there’s something called the subway.”

  “I asked Jean for an advance,” Lenny said. “But she doesn’t want to pay me till I’ve finished the work.”

  “She wouldn’t give you anything?” Audrey exclaimed. “Not twenty bucks?”

  Lenny shook his head dolefully. “The thing is, I don’t want to borrow any more money from Tanya—”

  “All right, all right,” Audrey interrupted. “I hear you. My bag’s on the backseat. Take fifty bucks.”

  There was a silence. Lenny went on chewing his hot dog.

  Audrey smiled the complicated smile of someone knowingly submitting to a con. “A hundred then, but no more.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t give me that. Just take the money.”

  Joel had been telling Audrey for years that Lenny was a wastrel, that he did not deserve her indulgence. He had once accused her of treating Lenny as if he were her “gigolo.” But none of these reproaches had ever come close to making her change her ways. Audrey was rather proud of her reckless devotion to her son. To hear Lenny attacked only excited her heroic sense of being for him, contra mundum.

  Twenty-seven years ago, on the night that Lenny’s mother had been arrested for bank robbery, it was Audrey who had been delegated to drive uptown and retrieve seven-year-old Lenny from his babysitter. There had been a snowstorm in the city that day, and it had taken her an hour to drive up the hushed, white island to Harlem. She had spent another hour going around in circles, trying to locate the address, and by the time she finally entered the tiny apartment above a barbershop on St. Nicholas Avenue, it was long past midnight. She had found Lenny curled up on the sitting room floor, watching cartoons, with a giant, panting bull mastiff at his side. “Am I going to get paid?” the babysitter had demanded. She had just finished painting her nails, and she was shaking her flexed hands in a slow, up-and-down motion, as if she were casting off water or making an incantation. “Because the extra hours is time and half, you know.”