by Ruby Namdar
Andrew rose, letting the napkin fall to the floor again. The nausea, however, was gone. Abashed, he looked around to see if anyone had noticed his strange behavior, bent to pick up the napkin, and sat down once more, doing his best to look nonchalant. What, after all, had happened? Nothing to be that upset about. He took a deep breath and looked to his right, where his jilted neighbor had despaired long ago of his being her cavalier for the evening. Her twin on the left, who no longer resembled her as much, had found a way to occupy herself, too; taking a small makeup kit from her bag, she was busy redoing the lines of her face with the help of a rectangular little mirror on her powder box. Where could Ann Lee have gone? Should he go look for her? Where could she be? He couldn’t just get up and leave now, before the last speeches. They hadn’t even served dessert yet. He had no choice but to stick it out to the end.
An after-dinner speaker ascended the podium. The ceremonious, empty words resounded in the ballroom. Yet though the sound system worked perfectly and the remarks could be heard clearly at the farthest tables, Andrew had trouble following them. The annoying buzzing in his ears started up again and the distant trumpet blasts were joined by strange kitchen noises mysteriously emanating from the vents of the air conditioners, creating a cacophonous chaos. A second speaker mounted the podium. The audience’s attention was flagging. Sounds of laughter and renewed conversation came from unseen places in the ballroom. Yet Bernie and his distinguished companions at the main table went on listening, a knowing expression of amusement on their sharply featured faces. From time to time, they exchanged the sly, intimate whispers of an inner circle of confidants. Something was happening behind the scenes—something unclean, unethical, immoral. Where was she now? Had she gone home? She had planned to come back with him to his apartment tonight. Poor girl! She could be cruel when she wanted, but there was a childlike innocence beneath it all, a pure, honest streak that commanded respect. Andrew’s glance wandered back to the centerpiece on the table. Something had changed in the course of the evening: there were new colors in it. The warmth and humidity had made some buds open their mouths and shamelessly show their orange palates to the world. The large, decadent flowers reminded him of something—something that aroused his longing. A deep orange, turning almost scarlet at the margins; at the center, a concentrated black. Long, ragged, translucent petals, the light streaming through them bringing you back to distant childhood. Gorgeous wildflowers—and so fresh. They sold them by the roadside on Cape Cod, in empty cans with half-peeled-off labels. Gay, casual bouquets in all the sizes, colors, and stages of blossoming and wilting. Fiery splotches of color, so in contrast to the restrained palette of the Atlantic coast, their pure vitality the gift of fast-approaching death. A blue-gray line runs from one end of the horizon to the other, filling it with fierce yearning. The pearly hue of the big bay beyond the front porch. The stubborn bushes turning yellow in the late summer sun beneath an enormous sky. So many stars, so much sky. If only he could be in the Cape now, bathing in the infinite purity of its sky and water.
17
The clink of bottles against glasses and forks against plates brought Andrew back to reality. He looked around as if waking from a dream, blinking in the dim light. Dessert! Dessert was being served. That was a good sign. Serving dessert before the speeches were over meant the evening wouldn’t go on past eleven thirty. The pugilistic waiter reappeared behind him. “A dessert wine, sir?” His crisp courtesy showed no sign of his former annoyance or even of recognition. Andrew nodded, eager to avoid further complications, and the waiter bent to fill a long-stemmed glass with a viscous yellow liquid. Andrew raised it cautiously to his lips. It was a Madeira, oily and bitter as it was meant to be, but with none of the freshness of the pure rainwater that gave it its legendary name.
A small, gold-rimmed plate was set in front of him. On it was a piece of olive oil cake with coriander seed, drenched in an apricot compote that had the Madeira’s telltale bitterness, too. The whole thing was too rich, too pretentious, too baroque. Like the entire menu—like the entire evening—it was overdone. What would have been wrong with an elegant Sauterne and a lighter, more summery dessert—say, an airy fresh fruit whip? His fork plowed through the heavy cake, which could have been cast in bronze. When might he get to the Cape? The sooner, the better. They had agreed that Linda would have the house for July and he would have it for August. But he couldn’t wait for August, he had to have it before then! He took a sip of wine, made a face, swallowed the rest of the glass, and put it down. He had never liked Madeira. He preferred ports or Sauternes, even certain sweet sherries.
The waiter stepped up behind him and refilled his glass without asking. It had been refilled all evening—who knew how much he had drunk? And on a practically empty stomach! Ann Lee had had a lot, too; he had never seen her in such a state. As soon as the speeches were over, he would slip away and look for her. He couldn’t get up and leave now, not in the middle of a speech. Could she have gone to his place after all? That seemed unlikely. In fact, there was no chance of it. His fork clinked against his empty plate. To his dismay, Andrew saw that he had eaten the entire piece of cake, the whole overly rich concoction he had sneered at. For a moment, he felt a childish, embarrassing urge to ask for a second helping, from which he refrained not only because he mustn’t overdo it but also, and perhaps above all, because of the mockery he feared seeing in the hostile waiter’s eyes. His nausea, which he thought his body had vanquished, was back again—not as violently as before, but still unpleasantly enough. Air! He needed some air. Why wasn’t this place better ventilated?
Where was he? The white window frames, jutting out from clapboard walls turned gray with age, were like some mysterious script. Although in the really old houses the wood had turned almost black, its blue trim made it look younger, more alive. Empty rocking chairs graced the front porches, swaying softly in the sea breeze, the creak of their wooden runners keeping time with the boom of the surf. The house was gray inside and out. Every passing year had left its mark, like the annual marks of the children’s height on the jamb of the kitchen door. Layer upon layer in the living body of the wood, their silent memories were faithfully preserved.
Andrew took a deep, desperate breath of over-conditioned air. A warm, salty sea mist tickled his nose, causing his upper lip to quiver as if he were about to sneeze. He had to look away to avoid seeing the little girl stretching her thin body as high as it could go, small heels pressed to the floor, the ruler on her head at a right angle to the wall, her eyes shining like dark suns, like stars. Our wonderful old kitchen. That peeling, crumbling, aging room. All the old cutlery with its ceramic, glass, and enamel handles, the heavy, antique, time-burdened spoons and forks. The last thing he had bought for the house was a set of new knives. It was right toward the end, during their last summer together: a superb, expensive German set of Wüsthof knives. All must be dull by now. Unlike the knives in his New York apartment, he had never sharpened them. Linda hadn’t bothered to cut vegetables and meat on their wooden cutting board, preferring to do it directly on the granite counter, or on plates and trays. Her negligence had annoyed him. That was the way to ruin a good knife. They needed to be sharpened. Perhaps he would do it this summer.
The little girl was still there, jumping up and down excitedly, trying to read the numbers on the doorjamb. “How many inches, Mom? How many inches?” How stuffy it was. He couldn’t breathe. He had to get out of here, now. Fuck all their speeches! Fuck them all! Andrew leaped to his feet without glancing at anyone, pushed back his chair, and headed quickly for the exit. Glass doors opened in front of him. A wave of hot, muggy air washed over him. Large, pitter-pat drops of rain fell on the sidewalk, drumming on the awning above him, which barely protected him from the summer storm. He looked to his right and to his left. The street was deserted. There was nothing but water and darkness. Turning up the collar of his jacket, he hiked up his pants and ran westward, into the storm, toward Madison Avenue. The warm, heavy drops pou
red down on him, drenching his hair, his clothes, the skin beneath them. Thunderless lightning flashed overhead. Andrew kept running, though he had no idea where he was going or what his mad dash would accomplish.
He saw her at the corner of Madison. How long was she standing there for? The thunder caught up there with both of them, crashing over them like a steamroller. She was dripping wet, soaked to the bone. Her black dress hung from her twiggy body like a wet rag, making her look spectacularly feminine and heartbreakingly thin. She didn’t look at him and he didn’t dare call her name. He approached her, slowing to a walk, and stood silently by her side. Long minutes went by before they were able to crawl into a large, night-cruising limousine that wheeled them away, each wet, silent, and withdrawn in a corner of the backseat. The car’s worn tires spun along the wet asphalt, the city’s lights glittering there like reflections in a black river flowing from nowhere to nowhere.
18
June 8, 2001
The 17th of Sivan, 5761
A gray, infinite, menacing desert stretches like a desolate sea all the way to the horizon. A stench of death in the air. Wails of terror and sorrow, the fetor of corpses. The dead birds pile up, gathered together upon heaps, their drooping wings caked with thin, ash-colored dirt, their beaks gaping in a helpless plea. Great plague rages through the stricken, delirious rabble. Noxious fumes rise from the heaps of rotting flesh that quiver in the merciless light. It’s my baby, I gave birth to it. I clutch it to my breast and make my way past the columns of smoke and the dying, flailing bodies on the ground. Its soft mouth is tightly clamped on my right nipple. It nurses desperately, sucking the last life I have to give it. It mustn’t stop. As long as I have milk for it, it will live, immune from the plague.
END OF BOOK FIVE
BOOK
SIX
1
June 8, 2001
The 18th of Sivan, 5761
Nine p.m. The remains of the light had drained out of the apartment, which was now immersed in a murky, irritable gloom. The rectangle of the laptop glowed in a corner of the room. Andrew was bent over it, as though trying to conceal it with his body. There was something unusual about his posture, as with the screen itself. Its usual bluish-gray background was now flesh-colored, the symmetrical lines of icons replaced with a jumble of intertwined bodies in a variety of odd positions that seemed too real to be anything but contrived.
Pornography. Just how did Andrew find himself in this remote corner of the Internet? It would be at best a half-truth to say it was an accident. He had been sitting at the computer all afternoon, in vain, trying to complete that same accursed article that ordinarily would have taken him a week or two, when he decided to surf the Web for inspiration. He needed something stimulating, radical, to restart his stalled thought processes: Sluts R Us—now, that was short and to the point! The site’s lengthy list of categories was arranged alphabetically: Anal, Bisexual, Cock Worship, Dwarves . . . Dwarves? Andrew clicked quickly on the mysterious title before his inhibitions could get in the way and stared incredulously at what appeared on the screen: A little woman, three feet tall, wearing nothing but a ridiculous-looking pink tutu, stood in front of a tall young man whose head and face were cut out of the frame. She was slightly hunched over his large erection, her mouth tightly pursed around it, her misshapen face contorted in an expression that aroused both pity and revulsion.
Andrew grimaced involuntarily, quickly shut the window, and moved the cursor to X-out. But the little arrow never reached the small box framing the X. No, not yet. His research called for further investigation. He scrolled up and down the alphabetized categories, too embarrassed to choose any of them yet too curious to forgo one last, quick glimpse into the unknown worlds they concealed. There it was: College. College? What did that mean? Andrew clicked on it, his inhibitions weakening, and found himself in an empty classroom. Next to a blackboard on which was scrawled childish, pseudo-mathematical equations, stood a bizarro version of the stereotypical professor, a man in an old-fashioned bow tie and tweed jacket, his pale penis extruding limply from his fly. Fondling it was a bare-breasted young student with oversize, lensless, black-framed glasses and thighs bursting from a schoolgirl’s short plaid skirt. What a dumb, primitive cliché! Who could be turned on by such a thing? Andrew regarded it disdainfully. Its banality relieved him: the entire genre was infantile, unimaginative, dumb. He X-ed out but decided to try one more before switching off his computer. No point in trying to write any more. After all, tomorrow is another day.
What else might be hiding in this virtual university of sex? As if it had any relation to reality. College Fuck Fest: the subtlety of these titles! The screen went suddenly dark. At its center appeared a shaky, grainy frame. A tangle of human figures that appeared to have been shot by a hidden camera. Several dozen strapping college students were gathered around a cleared space in the middle of what appeared to be a large basement, wildly cheering as if at a football game. The camera zoomed in on the clearing, maneuvering its way past a forest of brawny arms and budding beer bellies. The light intensified, as did the cheers, which grew so loud that Andrew had to mute the volume. For a second, the cheap home video lost its focus. Then, the delicate, vulnerable-looking body of a naked woman emerged from the blur, trapped in the hooting male circle. Andrew caught his breath. The unexpected sight grabbed him by the windpipe. The woman, very young-looking, crouched on all fours on the floor of a fraternity house, littered with cigarette butts and beer cans, her face down and her shapely white buttocks tilted upward in an inviting position. Two girlish braids hung down to the filthy floor like golden tassels.
There was a burst of noise. The sound had unmuted itself—Andrew’s fingers, nervously playing with the keyboard, must have clicked on it by mistake—and was blasting. The cheers, made to sound even more primitively barbaric by the amateur film’s changing volume and tempo, grew frenzied. The circle heaved and ejected into its center a tanned, muscular young man wearing designer sunglasses and a backward baseball cap. His bare chest and shoulders shone in the light of the room’s single, overhead lamp, his half-lowered jeans revealing a distended penis so unreal-looking that it seemed about to rocket from his body. Seizing the young woman’s pelvis, he lifted her lightly off the ground and rammed himself into her with a single quick motion. The cheers turned to roars. The circle went berserk. The young man, a smug smirk on his face, humped her white backside, which bounced up and down with a horrendous, hilarious jiggle. Just above it, at the base of the spine, the film slowed to reveal a light blue tattoo of a butterfly.
The screen suddenly went blank. What happened? Was the video over? No, it resumed, this time from a new angle. The camera had moved to the front of the young woman, whose now visible face might have been romantically misconstrued as having a rare, even spiritual beauty, while the young man, his cruel smirk grown broader, was at the far end of the unsteady patch of light. A loud, ugly laughter came next—the sound was out of sync with the picture—for now, the girl arched her back like a balky pony and stared at the camera with a hysterical, glassy-eyed whinny that was more like a muscular spasm than an expression of human emotion. Plastered to her face, her grin made one think of a grotesque carnival mask. “Man, he fucked her stupid,” said a drawling, beer-slurred voice behind the camera. There was another loud burst of laughter—Man, that was funny!—and the screen went blank again.
That was it. It was over, leaving only its residue in Andrew’s eyes and ears. Agitated, he rose from his chair and glanced vacantly around the room as if woken from a disturbing dream. The girl’s convulsive smile appeared to be beamed on every object, refusing to fade away. The young man’s hard stomach with its cubist planes of muscles kept flashing before him. That heartless, sneering smirk. That beautiful, white behind. Man, what an ass! He fucked her stupid! The small butterfly, bright to the point of transparency, fluttering over the clear fair skin. What should he do now? Should he watch it again? Make sure it was real, that he had actually seen wh
at he thought he had? Yet suppose someone came. Suppose Ann Lee were to surprise him drooling over cheap porn like some old pervert? Ridiculous! Who was going to come? Ann Lee had no plans to drop by. Lately, she had been busy all the time, and when she did come, it was always late at night, when she was tired and grumpy. Although they had made up after that absurd evening at Cipriani’s—half made up, anyway—things were no longer the same. Far from it.
A new, paranoid idea suddenly crept into Andrew’s mind: Was this vile video now burnt into his hard disk, imprinted on it forever like a tattoo? What if he got rid of his laptop one day, or gave it to recycling, and someone found it, retrieved its information, and used it to publicly shame him, the celebrated professor of comparative cultura? He breathed deeply, trying to calm himself. What an absurd, irrational thought! Who would do such a thing? His anxieties were running amok lately. He had to exercise more, eat healthier food, sleep longer hours. What time was it? Nine fifteen. The whole thing had lasted no more than a few minutes. And yet he felt as though it had gone on for hours and it was already the middle of the night. The apartment was dark, so dark. Time to turn on the lights. Should he watch the video again? No! Enough foolishness. Just turn off the damn computer.
2
June 8, 2001
The 17th of Sivan, 5761
The angel sits by my side, on the edge of the bed. He reaches out and touches me lightly. I wake from my sleep. For some reason, I am not surprised or frightened to see him there. He has something to show me, something important.