The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  “Are you okay, dear?” Jean said, returning from the hall. She placed a tentative hand on Audrey’s shoulder.

  “Oh, who cares if I’m okay?” Audrey snapped. “Just as long as that cow has her fucking monthly check.”

  “Audrey—”

  “Your snacks went down well.” Audrey gestured at the near-empty bowl on the table. “Did you see her? She couldn’t keep her trotter out of those nuts.”

  Jean was silent.

  “Yeah, I know,” Audrey said. “I mustn’t be mean about poor old Berenice. Poor single mother Berenice. You’ve really warmed to her, haven’t you? Perhaps you can have her back over sometime. I’m sure she’d like to have some rich friends now that’s she’s going to be getting fat—fatter, I should say—on my bank account.”

  “You know, Audrey, I’m not sure this is about the money for her.”

  “Oh, no, you’re right, it’s not just about money. It’s worse than that, isn’t it? She wants a piece of him. She wants to be part of my family. She’s a very homely woman who’s lived in obscurity all her life, taking her poncey photographs, and now she sees her chance to be at the center of things. Having Joel’s baby is the most glamorous, important thing that ever happened to her.”

  “Was that true, what you said about the children? About them not wanting to meet her?”

  “Of course it wasn’t. I haven’t told them about this.”

  “Perhaps you ought to, Audrey.”

  “Why on earth should they know about their father’s leg-over with some photographer bint? I will not have their respect for Joel destroyed.”

  Jean shook her head. “These things have a way of coming out in the end, Audrey. They just do. And if the kids ever discover that you kept this from them, they’ll be…” She stopped and peered at Audrey, who was bent over with her head in her hands, making an odd whooping noise. Jean was about to ask what was so funny, when it dawned on her that for the first time in their thirty-year friendship, she was seeing Audrey cry.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Raphael and Rosa sat on plastic chairs in the GirlPower Center watching Chianti and seven other girls perform a dance routine. The song playing on the boom box was a young woman’s paean to her boyfriend’s talent as a lover.

  Ooh, when you do what you do, I…Ooh

  It’s a feeling so totally new, I never even had a clue.

  The girls rolled their heads and pressed their hands to their chests in prepubescent imitations of sexual ecstasy.

  “This is pretty good!” Raphael whispered.

  Rosa looked at him.

  “Oh, go on, Rosa! It is. Look how well synchronized they are!”

  The girls had now lowered themselves into a prone position and were bouncing their groins up and down on the linoleum.

  “They’re humping the floor, Raphael.”

  “Well, it’s not meant to be ballet, you know.”

  The song ended now, with the girls lying on their backs, arms and legs extended like starfish.

  “Bravo,” Raphael shouted. “Great job!”

  The girls sat up, giggling.

  “Serious?” Chianti said breathlessly. “You liked it?”

  Raphael shook his head incredulously. “Are you kidding? That was amazing. I am so proud of you guys.” He patted Rosa’s knee. “Rosa liked it too.”

  “You did?” Chianti asked.

  Rosa paused, searching for an honest answer that would not be too discouraging. “It was fine. A bit graphic for my taste—”

  “You know what I think?” Raphael broke in. “You guys should do a performance at the GirlPower show in September. Wouldn’t that be great, Rosa?”

  All the girls began to chatter and shout at the same time.

  “Seriously?”

  “Could we?”

  “Ooh, we going to be famous!”

  “You going to let us, Rosa?”

  Rosa pressed her finger to her lips for silence. “I guess you could. As long as you were prepared to tone down some of the slutty stuff—”

  “Awwww,” the girls chorused in disappointment.

  “What you talking about, ‘slutty’?” Chianti demanded petulantly. “We wasn’t slutty.”

  “Yeah, we wasn’t slutty,” the other girls murmured.

  Raphael gave Rosa a sardonic thumbs-up. “Nice one, Ro.”

  “I have to go,” Rosa said, standing up. “We can discuss this tomorrow, Chianti.”

  “Off to synagogue, are you?” Raphael asked spitefully.

  “No, Raphael. As a matter of fact, I’m going home. Lenny’s coming over.”

  “What’s synagogue?” one of the girls asked.

  “It’s the place where Jews go to pray,” Raphael replied.

  “What’re Jews?”

  “Cha!” Chianti exclaimed. “You don’t know? Jews the people who killed Jesus.”

  Rosa wagged her finger, reprovingly. “That’s not quite right, Chianti. Jesus was a Jew, you know. And strictly speaking, it was the Romans who killed him.”

  “That ain’t what I heard,” Chianti said.

  “I’ll be happy to continue this conversation tomorrow, Chianti, but I really do have to go now.” Rosa walked over to the door. “I’ll see you all tomorrow, okay?”

  As she left the room, Chianti muttered something under her breath and everyone, including Raphael, started to laugh. The sound of their mirth followed Rosa all the way down the stairs to the ground floor.

  Jane, Rosa’s roommate, worked long hours in the public relations department at Tiffany and Company, and most evenings, Rosa had their little apartment on 102nd Street to herself. Tonight, however, as soon as she opened the front door, Jane darted out into the hall, holding a bottle of wine and bringing with her a gust of the Shania Twain CD that was playing in her bedroom. “Hey!” she shouted shrilly over the music. “Do you want some vino?”

  Rosa shook her head. It was best, she had learned, not to give Jane any quarter when she was in one of her strenuously festive, bon temps rouler moods.

  “Are you sure? I’m all on my ownsome tonight.”

  “No, thanks,” Rosa said. “Isn’t Eric around?” Eric was the hulking, baby-faced young man to whom Jane had recently become engaged.

  “Nah.” Jane pouted playfully. “He’s got a stag night…. Hey! You wanna see what he got me?”

  Before Rosa could reply, Jane had ducked back into her room and reemerged with a large, white stuffed bunny. Between its paws there was a red heart, embroidered with the slogan “I love you better than carrots!”

  “Isn’t it cute?” she cried.

  Rosa considered the bunny stonily. “It’s very nice.”

  Rosa had some cause to regard herself as a worldly woman. As a child, she had broken bread with Daniel Ortega and sung freedom songs with ANC activists in Soweto and played softball with Abbie Hoffman. By the age of eighteen, she had seen both her parents arrested for acts of civil disobedience and had twice been arrested herself. Yet, in truth, her worldliness applied to a very narrow band of the world, and there were large areas of ordinary American life about which her impeccably progressive, internationalist upbringing had left her astonishingly ignorant. Until a year ago when she had answered Jane’s ad for a roommate on craigslist, her contact with bouncy, suburban American young women for whom cuddly toys were a meaningful expression of adult love had been negligible. And even now, twelve months later, most things about Jane—from the “Best Daughter in the World’ certificate hanging on her wall and the dog-eared library of Chicken Soup books lining her Pier One bookshelf to the holiday cookies she baked for Eric and the thrice-weekly, hour-long phone conversations she had with her concerned parents in Fort Lauderdale—posed an appalling anthropological mystery for Rosa. She approached all their interactions in the wary, squeamish manner of a schoolchild dissecting a frog.

  Happily, Jane’s natural obtuseness, enhanced by years of self-esteem training, had saved her from taking offense. Insofar as she noticed Rosa’
s froideur at all, she attributed it to social awkwardness. Rosa, she had decided, was a shy girl, who needed bringing out of herself. To this end, she was always appearing at Rosa’s bedroom door—gooseflesh hips spilling over the top of her low-rise jeans, a mug of Celestial Seasonings in her cupped hands, wanting to parse a celebrity interview in InStyle magazine, or to deliver a bulletin from her hectic life in the fast lane of public relations. Not long ago, while listing the super-A-list invitees to an upcoming “Russian Winter”–themed Tiffany party, she had placed a consoling palm on Rosa’s shoulder and assured her, “My job isn’t as glamorous as this all the time, believe me!” Rosa, to whom the idea of Jane’s job being glamorous had honestly never occurred, was stymied. She could not help but be irked by this idiotic girl’s condescension. And she could not help but be disappointed with herself for being irked.

  “Are you sure you won’t have a glass of wine?” Jane asked now.

  Rosa opened the door to her room. “Absolutely sure.”

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Not much,” Rosa said, closing the door gently behind her.

  The size of Rosa’s room was in keeping with the minimal rent that she paid for it. Aside from a pile of books on the floor by her bed and a bag of raw almonds lying on the table—emergency rations for when she got hungry at night and didn’t want to risk being ambushed by Jane in the kitchen—it was furnished as impersonally as a Motel 6. A smudgy window looked out on a blackened air shaft; the only other source of light was a fluorescent tube on the ceiling. “Oh, my God, Rosa,” Raphael had cried on the one occasion that he had visited her here, “I love what you’ve done with this place!”

  Rosa sat down on her bed and ate an almond. There were two messages waiting for her on her answering machine. The first was from Chris Jackson, inviting her to the Bowery Ballroom on Thursday night to see a band whose name she did not recognize. “The guitarist is kind of a close friend of mine,” he said, “so we’ll probably get to party with them afterward.” The second message was also from Chris. He wanted to make clear, if he hadn’t already, that the gig on Thursday was a pretty hot ticket and that if, for some reason, Rosa couldn’t make it, she should let him know as soon as possible so he could ask someone else….

  Rosa pressed the erase button. Chris had called to ask her out at least five times since their meeting at the Monsey bus stop. In the beginning, she had taken care to sweeten her refusals with the pretense of having other plans, but he had kept on calling, and now she found herself growing increasingly impatient with him. How did one explain such thickheadedness? Such presumption? Perhaps he imagined he was wearing her down. Perhaps he regarded a preliminary display of female scorn as a necessary formality in the courtship ritual. At any rate, he was a pain. Rosa leaned over and picked up a book lying by her bed, entitled How Jews Pray. Through the papery apartment walls, she could hear the thump of the Shania CD and the baby-doll laughter of Jane, talking to someone on the phone. With an irritable sigh, she found her page and began to read.

  Lenny arrived an hour late, smelling of cigarettes and unwashed clothes. “I brought someone with me,” he told Rosa as soon as she opened the door. Behind him, lurking in the hallway shadows, Rosa glimpsed his friend Jason. She nodded a chilly greeting. She had hoped to have a private conference with Lenny this evening. He had been behaving in a worrying way of late, and she wanted to ask him some forthright questions about his current drug use. (At this point in the long and miserable history of his addiction, she had no illusions about her ability to avert any relapse for which he might be headed, but it was always useful to know what was in the offing with Lenny and to let him know that you knew.) Now, however, her plot had been foiled. Lenny—who was a good deal craftier than his cultivated air of haplessness tended to suggest—had no doubt intuited her agenda for the evening and enlisted Jason’s presence precisely in order to forestall it.

  “Whatup, Ro?” Jason said as he stepped across the threshold. “How’s it going?” He was an unprepossessing man in his late twenties, with a babyish potbelly and a tiny patch of reddish beard that looked like a ketchup splash. He spoke with the smirking defiance of a person accustomed to being unwelcome. “Hey, do you mind if I use your bathroom?”

  Rosa pointed him down the hall. As he sloped off, she turned to Lenny with hunched shoulders and pointed chin. “What the—?”

  “I’m sorry,” Lenny said, “he just kind of tagged along.”

  Rosa led the way into the kitchen. “You shouldn’t be hanging around with guys like Jason, anyway, Lenny.”

  “Oh, Jason’s okay.”

  “No, he’s not.”

  Lenny sat down at the kitchen table. “He’s my friend.”

  “So. Make a new one. You know you look terrible, right?”

  He smiled. “I love you too, sis.”

  Jason came back from the bathroom. “What’s there to eat, man?”

  Rosa had not considered food. She opened the refrigerator and gave its contents a cursory inspection. “I could make you some spaghetti with butter and cheese, I guess.”

  “My God, Rosa,” Lenny said. “You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble.”

  Rosa closed the refrigerator door smartly. “Well, I wasn’t expecting to be hosting a dinner party, Lenny. Do you want spaghetti, or not?”

  “Okay, yeah.”

  Rosa filled a pot with water and lit the stove.

  “Have you got anything to drink?” Jason asked.

  “There’s some water in the fridge and some orange juice.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Hi, guys!” Jane poked her head around the side of the kitchen door.

  Rosa gave her a discouraging smile. “This is my brother, Lenny, and this is Jason, Lenny’s friend.”

  “Hi!” Jane gave a little wave.

  “Hi, Jane.” Lenny and Jason looked her up and down, taking in her French manicure and her pink, fluffy slippers.

  “You guys want some wine?” Jane asked.

  “Sure,” Lenny said.

  Jane went off to her room and came back holding a bottle of chardonnay. “Are you making pasta?” she asked Rosa.

  “Correct.”

  “Would you like some?” Lenny said.

  “Really?” Jane looked over at Rosa. “Would that be okay?”

  Rosa shrugged her shoulders.

  “Yeaaah, no problem,” Lenny said expansively.

  Jason pulled out a chair. “Come on, join us!”

  Jane sat down. “Awesome! I’m actually kind of starving. I only had a Cliff bar for lunch.”

  “Busy day, huh?” Lenny spoke with a self-conscious, faintly facetious charm, as if it were an amusing novelty for him to traffic in such trite inquiries.

  “Oh, my God, yes.” Jane stuck out her tongue to indicate her exhaustion. “It was so hot today! I thought I was going to pass out on the subway platform.”

  “Yeah? That’s rough, man,” Jason said.

  Rosa’s expression grew rigid. Jane, it seemed, had piqued some snobbish amusement in Lenny and Jason, and now, in the guise of paying her courtly attention, they were going to entertain themselves by sniggering at her provincialism.

  Lenny poured himself some wine and examined the bottle. “This isn’t going to last us. Give me some money, Ro, and I’ll go to the liquor store”

  Rosa shook her head. “If you want to drink, Lenny, pay for it yourself.”

  “I’ve got some cash!” Jane offered.

  Lenny rewarded her with his most beguiling smile. “Great! You wanna come with me?”

  “Sure!”

  Left alone with Rosa, Jason stretched out on his chair. “So, it’s too bad about your dad. I guess he’s not doing so good.”

  Rosa nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s got to be rough, man—the coma thing.”

  “Mmm.”

  There was a pause. “I hear you’re into religion these days.”

  Rosa, who was trying, bad-temperedly, to bend
the spaghetti into a too-small pot, gave a small shudder. “Is that how Lenny put it?”

  “Judaism, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Yuh mon—getting down with the rabbis. Are you gonna start wearing a wig and all that stuff?”

  “Jason—”

  “No offense,” Jason said quickly. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s cool.” He waited a moment. “I’ve never really been into religion myself. I mean, I’m not against religion, per se, I’m just not into organized religion, you know? I was raised Catholic, and man, that is the worst, most hypocritical shit. If I was going to get religious, it’d be something a little freer.”

  Rosa stared grimly into the spaghetti water.

  “Have you ever been to Stonehenge?” Jason asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Aw, man, you got to go. It’s like this circle of humongous stones that these guys built in England thousands of years ago—”

  “I know what it is, Jason.”

  “They used to dance around these stones in the nude, or whatever, drinking potions and praising their gods. I could totally get into a religion like that, you know what I’m saying?”

  She turned around from the stove. “I know what you’re saying, Jason, I’m just not that interested.”

  Jason raised his hands in surrender. “Fair enough, fair enough.”

  Fifteen minutes later, when Lenny and Jane returned from the liquor store, Rosa served up the spaghetti.

  “This is raw, Rosa,” Lenny complained, prodding sulkily at his serving with a fork.

  “Dude,” Jason said, “this is al dente.”

  “Whatever, it tastes like sticks, man.”

  Rosa, who had inherited her mother’s contempt for the domestic arts, was unabashed. “Don’t eat it if you don’t like it.”