unwind. But we can cut down if you’re not comfortable. We can cut down anytime we want, I promise, because we’re not like the others who let it consume them. We’re people who know how to stay in control. Ever y now and then I take a little sniff of powder when I go to the john. That’s it. That’s all. Keeps me regular. On special occasions, like now, I smoke. It’s like drinking champagne. We’re just going to take a little hit, and then I’m going to make passionate love to you. You’re going to feel like it’s the Fourth of July.” He started to sing: “Skyrockets in flight, afternoon delight.” Then, holding out the pipe: “Do you know that song? Come on, Scheherazade. Take a hit.”
And she did, because Nick was more than a means to an end. There are some people – some things – that, if you really love them, can wield that much power over you.
*
On a frigid morning in early March, Nick and she drove to the countr yside, to a town named Hamilton, forty minutes north of Rockfield. They entered a forest and then a clearing with a lake that was frozen in spots. The road continued alongside the water. After a cur ve to the left, an enormous wood-frame house appeared. “Let’s get out,” Nick said, pulling up to it.
The smell of new cedar shingles reminded Fatma of the air in
Mombasa. There was not another house in sight.
“Be careful,” Nick said as he led her along the iced-over driveway to the front door.
“Who we visiting?”
“No one,” he said, putting a key in the door.
The ceilings were high – cathedral, he called them. The carpeting and walls were cream colored, the kitchen filled with cherry cabinets and stainless-steel appliances, and the stone fireplace reached up to the ceiling. In the great room, atrium doors formed a glass wall that overlooked the lake.
“Imagine. Once there were houses – a whole town there.” He pointed to the lake.
“What happen?”
“They flooded it. The government took it over, turned it into a reservoir.”
“What about people?”
“Bad luck, I guess. What do you think?” “Mean. Like something they do in Somalia.” “I mean the house.” He laughed.
“Beautiful!”
He was grinning now, the way he did when he knew he had done something really fine. She could see his chest expanding with pride, and she thought he might pound on it with both fists like a gorilla would.
“Good thing you like it, because it’s yours.” “What?”
“I bought it. That’s where we’ll plant the garden.” He pointed in the direction of the atrium doors, although she couldn’t tell exactly where he meant; everything was covered in snow. “So we can look out at it every spring and summer morning and watch the flowers grow. When do you want to move in?”
It had been the wrong question to ask her – it was out of sequence – and, as much as she wanted to say yes, she refused again. She had to regain control of her plan.
“I need to marry if you want that we live together,” she said. His expression went from confused to hurt.
“Didn’t you think I would marry you?”
“In Muslim law,” she blurted out, feeling her dead mother’s chains around her neck.
“How about tonight, Scheherazade?”
*
There was, of course, a bouquet of roses on the table in the restaurant that evening. Nick had arranged to have them there. The waiter poured two glasses of champagne, and Nick took a black velvet box out of his pocket. Inside, sitting in white satin, was a yellow gold ring with a modest pear-shaped diamond. It wasn’t quite as large as Fatma would have liked.
“I’m going to treat you like a real princess,” he said.
“I am real princess,” she reminded him, but Africa was fading from her mind; she had helped obliterate its memor y. She told Nick she had met Daniel in school in Mombasa, that she had been one of his students, and that they had fallen in love: maybe to impress Nick, maybe because at that moment she couldn’t remember the real circumstances. For an instant, however, she felt an urge to tell him ever ything again, only this time the truth, never skipping a detail about the ranch in Mogadishu, about the dogs she used to ride, and the hunting trips to Kilimanjaro. Yet she refrained because she knew her past would loom too large over Nick’s world, a world in which he liked to be in the forefront. Then the instant passed, as did the urge.
They didn’t go to the Arabian mosque in Rockfield to get married that evening. Nick said he knew a woman whose brother Ishmael was a sheik, and that it would be more intimate, more personal that way. The place didn’t seem to be a mosque at all, just an ordinary home. Fatma’s brain had become far too muddled, more muddled than the average flawed human brain, as Lisha would have said, to question the circumstances that night. A woman, perhaps the sheik’s wife, gave her a red silk sari whose worn hem was soiled and frayed to put on over her low-cut pink taffeta dress. She stood beside Nick in his shiny dark suit. They repeated some vows in English, signed a paper, and it was over. She was deliriously happy.
*
Nick waited in the car while she told Mrs. Lucchese that she had married and would no longer be living in the apartment. The older woman shook her head in disapproval; nothing ever pleased her.
“Now what’d you go and do that for?” Sal, who rarely said anything, asked Fatma. He had never questioned her comings and goings, but it was clear that when it came to marriage, the line between blacks and whites should be drawn.
“Pazzi. Tutt’e due.” They were both crazy, Mrs. Lucchese muttered. “What’s the use to talk? You did it already.”
After Fatma broke the news, Pia disappeared. Fatma was walking back to Nick’s car when she came running after her, wearing her old maroon sweatshirt with UMASS written in big white letters across her breasts. She hadn’t bothered to put on a coat. “It’s a tablecloth my grandmother made.” She handed Fatma a flat package neatly held together with a lavender ribbon.
Fatma could see through the tissue paper that the cloth was white, with different-colored birds and flowers embroidered on it. Pia’s grandmother had to have given it to her that way, Fatma thought, because there hadn’t been any time for Pia to wrap it.
“It belong to you,” Fatma told her.
“Not really. Not until I marry, and I have no intentions of doing that for a long time.”
“I can’t.”
“Please. I want to give you something. I hope it brings you luck. Believe me, I have plenty of others. All my grandmother ever did was embroider.”
“Thank you.” Fatma threw her arms around Pia, thinking that Italians were as superstitious as Muslims: always talking about luck, as though they never had a part in the way their lives turned out.
Nick beeped for Fatma to get into the car. “Be happy!” A grinning Pia called out, waving. Then, hugging her shivering body, she ran back into the store.
Fatma hadn’t taken anything from the apartment, because Nick told her he wanted her to have everything new. But Mrs. Lucchese came roaring out of the store and told Fatma she wanted all of Fatma’s stuff out – everything clean.
“If you don’t take it, I’m gonna burn it,” Mrs. Lucchese said. Fatma ran upstairs and emptied the contents of several
drawers into a suitcase. The money she used to hide in the china closet was nearly gone now: a little of it had been wired to Auntie, the rest recycled in a way – back to where it had come – to some other street junkie to support Nick’s and her habit, to chasing that first high. The rest of her belongings Mrs. Lucchese could burn. Tomorrow she and Nick were going furniture shopping; they were starting out brand new.
*
“Ninakupenka,” Fatma whispered in bed to Nick the first night in their new home. She hadn’t spoken Swahili in years.
“What did you say?” he asked. “I love you.”
The House
of the Five-Headed Monster
Fatma quit working at the pizzeria and Juicy Burger. It would have been impossible t
o get to Rockville, living way out in Hamilton. Daniel had tried to teach her to drive not long after she arrived in America, but early on she had crashed into a police car and refused to get behind the wheel again. Now she regretted that decision. She asked Nick to give her lessons. “Sure,” he said. But he never made the time, seemingly preferring to keep her dependent on him and to know where she was at all times. “Besides, how would it look?” he said, explaining that the wife of a prominent attorney couldn’t be seen shredding mozzarella, refilling red pepper and parmesan cheese shakers, sweeping the floor, and assembling burgers. He assured her money was no object and promised to start sending some regularly to her family, as soon as he sold his condo in Connecticut and paid off the mortgage on the new house.
She traveled to Rockfield with him some days because she was lonely out in Hamilton. But other than meeting Nick’s supplier in the foyer of a burned-out apartment house on Hanson Street to relieve Nick of the chore, she didn’t have anything to do in the city. She stayed away from the Royal Lion; Nick said now that she was married to him, her being seen there would jeopardize his firm. She passed by the Luccheses’ deli sometimes and, avoiding Mrs. Lucchese and Sal, peeked in the window, but Pia was never there. She didn’t dare venture near India. And so she began to watch Nick in court.
The first case she attended involved a university boy who had been charged with stabbing his roommate to death in a drunken brawl because the roommate had called him a faggot. It went on for several weeks, and for long periods of time in the courtroom nothing at all seemed to be happening. Fatma had imagined that all lawyers must be good actors to talk to jurors the way they did on TV. However, she learned that most of them, including Nick, didn’t in the least talk the way actors did; most witnesses never broke down hysterically; and, without moving background music, the courtroom scene was quite dull.
In another case Nick defended a government employee who had kept his nephew and mother on his agency’s payroll for years, although they had never actually worked, according to the prosecution. Fatma watched Nick carry heavy ledgers from his table over to the judge and then back to his table. He rattled off lots of numbers, and the monotonous sound of his chanting lulled her to sleep. One day a dead silence woke her up. Nick had stopped in midsentence. The judge and jury screwed up their faces, trying to understand what Nick was getting at, but he couldn’t seem to get back on track. The judge called a recess.
Nick lost that case. He also lost the one with the boy, and Fatma started to believe that her presence might be bringing him bad luck.
“I hadn’t expected to win,” he said, taking a gulp of scotch at Edelweiss.
“How can you defend guilty people?” “I didn’t say he was guilty.” “I don’t understand.”
“It’s my job, Fatma,” he said. “Everyone deserves to be defended. I’ve told you that. Sometimes you just hope for a lighter sentence, maybe cut a deal.” But he couldn’t hide his disappointment.
She stopped going to court. The nice weather had arrived, and she didn’t need to get out of the cold when she went into Rockfield. She started walking all over the city, to places she’d never been. It amazed her that she’d lived in the city as long as she had and yet there always seemed something new to see: a house painted an interesting color, a building being renovated, a new store opening. One afternoon she wandered into a park that Daniel had warned her to avoid. She didn’t see anything worse going on than she’d seen in the alley and bathroom of the Royal Lion. The park wasn’t very big, and there was little grass and a few trees inside its gates, but there was a large greenhouse with milky glass panes. She needed to go to the bathroom, and she needed a fix. Cocaine had taken her fast.
“How much?” she asked a lady sitting behind a desk in the foyer.
“Nothing, dear. It’s free. The greenhouse is maintained by the
Oliver Lyttle estate.”
She didn’t know who Oliver Lyttle was; all she knew was that she had walked into paradise. There were blue and purple crocuses, white, red, pink, yellow, and orange tulips, and air as sweet as Auntie’s cologne. One little room was almost entirely taken up by a display of pots; more flowers attached to chicken wire cascaded down the walls. She could have stayed there the rest of the day, but she walked on, into a room that was hot and humid and familiar, with enormously tall palm trees, and wide-leafed rubber plants, ornamental banana plants, quinine trees. She recognized the tall thin bark and fernlike canopy of the tamarind from East Africa – from home. And there she sat until it was time to meet Nick.
“Why you never take me there?” she asked Nick on their ride back to Hamilton.
“To tell you the truth, I never knew about it. I only work in
Rockfield, remember. I’ve always lived in Enfield.” Daniel had never mentioned it either.
“You have to come, Nick. It’s beautiful. Like Mombasa.” “Why don’t we build you your own greenhouse? That way I
won’t have to worry about you wandering alone all over the city.” “Build a greenhouse where?”
“Right outside the bedroom doors. I was going to have a patio put in there. We’ll have a little conser vator y attached to the house instead. I see them advertised all the time. I’ll call about it tomorrow.”
By early summer she had a greenhouse – not nearly as big as the one in the park, but a greenhouse all the same, and something to occupy her when she wasn’t getting high. She potted and repotted, watered, trimmed dead blossoms and leaves, and fertilized plants. Nick and she bought from a local nursery where they taught her how to grow chrysanthemums from seeds, and in the fall her greenhouse was bursting with color. While she couldn’t have all the tropical plants she’d have liked, because the conservatory was too small, and without temperature control, she did have a few rubber trees and one that grew miniature oranges.
She was in the conservatory the Saturday Nick went crazy. It was the following spring, but her tulips hadn’t come up quite like the ones in Oliver Lyttle’s greenhouse despite the fact that she had spent her winter days in the conservatory – mostly dreaming however – and smoking, and wondering from time to time why there had been no more mention of Mombasa or Hussein from Nick or her. No more mention of the baby that had never come. But then those thoughts evaporated as quickly as they had come. The car door slammed; there was some mumbling and a series of bangs. When she looked out, she saw Nick in the driveway, back from golfing, cursing and swinging one of his clubs every which way, whacking at the asphalt over and over again as though he were beating it to death. She ran out.
“What is wrong?” she asked, careful to keep her distance from the flailing club.
“Fucking bitch! Fuckingsonofabitch!” was all he kept saying. Frightened, she crept back into the house and waited in the
greenhouse until the sun set and the moon appeared. Until Nick’s evil jinn retreated to its dark hiding place. Until, calm as a dhow docked in Mombasa harbor, he came looking for her, fixed her dinner, and took her to bed.
*
Nick stopped playing golf that day. He stopped going in to work regularly too. At first he said Tom was handling most things and that he was cutting back. Maybe he would sell him the practice. But Tom took off about a year after Fatma had met him, just about the time Emma left. They couldn’t work for nothing. According to Madison, who had felt some kind of obligation to call Fatma, word was going around about Nick’s growing unreliability. He was missing appointments and was incoherent in the courtroom. Nick said he had fired Tom.
“Time to get a new associate,” he announced. “And a new secretar y.”
Tom and Emma, however, had been his last staff, because things were changing for Nick. The tight band that had held his cool façade together finally snapped, and he began to spin out of control, whisking Fatma up in his whirlwind.
The house was laid out so their bedroom windows faced west. The early morning sun didn’t disturb them; instead, they had a great view of it setting on summer evenings. Still, in t
he six years they lived in the house in Hamilton, they were too far gone to appreciate the red sunsets, the falling snow, the colorful palette of autumn leaves, or her precious greenhouse, where the plants dried up from neglect and died just like everything else in the house that Nick had bought for her. In time, they would light up right after breakfast. They’d drink to come down faster, shower, then light up over and over again until suppertime, always chasing that next hit, that next high.
She lost track of what was happening in Somalia: warlords hunted down by American militar y; civilians fired upon during the searches; the children’s wing of a hospital bombed. She had no idea what was happening to her family, and they had no idea what was happening to her. Auntie must have worried herself sick about Fatma, thinking she had dropped off the face of the earth. But she hadn’t. She’d just slipped into a subterranean part of it where other things and other people ruled. As Isaac once said: “No lions and tigers in this jungle, Fatma. Just people who act like them.”
*
Frustration grew in Nick as his savings disappeared faster than a road in Katundu during the rainy season. His taste in drugs and liquor became less discriminating. There were no more trips to Vegas, the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, or even Boston. Edgy, he followed her around the house until there was no space she could be in without him being in it too. As their appetites waned, they stopped going to the supermarket and restaurants and had food delivered every now and then, cases of cheap alcohol more often. He got depressed. She lost so much weight that her chest looked almost as flat as Nick’s. They began to bait each another, satisfied only after pushing their limits, and they invented a dance far more intimidating than any dance the Kornmeyers had engaged in. Arabs say you are not born a warrior, you become one. Nick and Fatma turned into their own private armies.
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