by Sharon Heath
Before Adam there had been only the void and the small-c-catholic collection of methods I employed to fill it. Those methods included pinching the loose skin under my arm, banging my head, whirling, flapping, screaming, list-compiling, voracious reading, making Jillily’s motor whirr, sniffing roses and armpits, watching my favorite sycamore with Grandfather, noting the patterns of the birds landing on its branches, insinuating myself inside one of Nana’s Mack truck grips and feeling goose bumps spread across my scalp while she delivered little chicken peck kisses across my head.
Adam and I had met under what I would forever think of as the Very Worst Circumstances of My First Incarnation. My favorite person in the world (Grandfather) had died, and I’d tried to resurrect him in the spirit of the one I’d been taught to worship (Jesus), but had been stopped midstream by the man who made a political career out of saving babies from the devil abortionists (Father), who’d been squeezing me with his pincer-fingers to near-fainting point while we stood by Grandfather’s casket until my father was caught by his arch rival (Senator Manus), whose son had actually cried along with me amid the tombstones of Eden Rest Memorial Park, where I first learned where dead people whom we love really go (filling the holes in our hearts). My sweet savior was Adam.
Needless to say, the first feeling that attached to my new friend was gratitude, though I didn’t learn how to name that sensation, nor any other emotion for that matter, until Mother hired him to be my tutor after she left Father and the Main Line behind over the pincer incident. With patience and compassion for my odd-duck-ish quirks, Adam had filled my thirsty mind with history, literature, and what Sammie would later call “the three fuffs”: philosophy, physics, and feelings.
Which I suppose was why, several days following our team’s last confab, I reached out to Adam by cellphone, rattling on about such topics as the likelihood of the CERN team finding the Higgs Boson (or, as the mainstream media liked to call it, “the God particle”) and the potential for epigenetic consequences in the application of P.D. “I know I’m not the only one dying to see the Higgs field proven at last,” I’d confessed the previous morning. “I mean, think about it, Adam. Our gooey universe held together by elementary boson superglue like a crowd piling into a phone booth with infinite room for more and more and more.”
I have to confess that my enthusiasm wasn’t exactly unambivalent. Yes, like most physicists, I was fascinated with the Higg’s Boson, but my heart wasn’t really in it. Instead, it longed to engage full tilt in the application of C-Voids to dematerialization and the revolutionary diminishment of our reliance on fossil fuels that was likely to be its outcome. Sammie liked to say that, when she was at an impasse with one of her paintings, she’d just move on to another for a while. I was discovering that my mind simply wasn’t constructed like that. While my tweeter seemed intent on proving Freud’s speculations about polymorphous perversity, my scientific imagination was stuck on one beloved project and couldn’t so easily pencil another into my dance card.
“Wait,” Adam said, wading through the squid ink of my defenses. “You’re sounding like Sammie—you’re talking too fast. What’s wrong?”
Or, as Sammie would have said, “You’re so busted.”
He waited.
Have I mentioned Adam was particularly patient? I used to think that his twisted leg had something to do with it. But now I suspected it had more to do with growing up virtually alone in his own father’s Main Line mansion, without even a wing full of saved babies or invisible beds of David Austins to distract him.
It occurred to me then that we should both thank God for physics, home for odd ducks with odd brains. (Though it was questionable which god we should be thanking. The baboon-headed Egyptian Thoth? Japan’s scarecrow deity Kuebico? The Norse god Odin, who sacrificed an eye and hung from the world tree to achieve wisdom and frequently took advice from the decapitated head of the water spirit Mímir? Dhani once told me that, in her native town of Delhi, you can approach any stranger on the street and ask, “Will you be the incarnation of God for me?” If they say yes, you’re free to set up an altar with their photograph, light candles and incense, and literally pray to their image as the soother of all your sorrows and grantor of your deepest wishes.)
Adam was so patient that all these thoughts were free to meander unhurriedly through my mind before he repeated his question. “What is it, Fleur?”
“It’s Assefa. He’s back.”
“And?”
Somehow, this time around I was feeling uncomfortable talking to Adam about Assefa. It almost felt like a betrayal of each of them, even though Adam had no idea I thought of him as my first love (understandable on his part, since we’d never flirted, let alone kissed) and even though I’d had to witness his smittenness over a series of beauties from Stephanie Seidenfeld to his fiancée Lisa Trooly—she of the ecstatically-grinning Bird of Paradise yoga pose on her Facebook profile. (And yes, I sneaked more looks at her timeline than I cared to count. I couldn’t be blamed if she chose to make it public, could I? You’d expect a Harvard T.A. to know a thing or two about security settings.)
Anyway, Adam had no compunctions about probing into my own private life, especially when he sensed I was unhappy or in danger. “Out with it, Fleur,” he insisted. “You know you’ll feel better when you’ve gotten it off your chest.”
The only thing I’d ever really wanted to get off my chest were my breasts, which I had to use no end of postural exercise to keep from dragging me forward like the red-faced, baby-blue-robed young woman who lived next door to our Manhattan penthouse, who used to shuffle up and down the block scrutinizing the sidewalk for clues to something. Undoubtedly her lost mind. That fruitless ritual of hers had given me nightmares for weeks. Was there a cosmic Lost and Found located at the bottom of a particularly empty-ish void, where minds and lovers might be rediscovered?
I burst out, “I lost Assefa, and Makeda found him. I’m sure she filled his void in ways I can’t imagine. I’ll bet she’s never flapped in her life. He dumped me like a plastic bag inside a bird. Like a giant garbage patch. He didn’t want me anymore, but now he’s home and keeps calling me, but I can’t bring myself to call him back.”
“I’m coming over,” Adam said. Whatever was he talking about? The phone went dead. I couldn’t believe he’d cut off our connection.
Sloping up the hallway like a vagrant ghost, I stared at myself dolefully in my bathroom mirror, treating my outer thigh like a twist tie. Things were getting precariously close to a Grade One. It was Sammie Time. I washed my face, grabbed my purse, and flung open the front door only to find Adam standing a few inches from my nose. I jumped, and not just because he was supposed to be in Boston. He looked awful. And strange. He was sporting a new soul patch that might have been sexy if it weren’t accentuating an unfamiliar pair of dark half moons under his wide green eyes.
He gave me a rueful smile. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”
“It is that,” I squeaked, before he enveloped me in a comforting hug.
I felt grateful that neither Stanley nor Gwennie was home. Gwennie had insisted that Stanley owed her something for faithfully nursing him during the nasty infection that followed the loss of his tooth. Ushering him out the door for her weekly “C the Big Picture” meeting, she’d commented, “Somebody’s got to make sure we get your project back on the docket for next year’s appropriations. Lord knows Our Man in Washington isn’t doing anything about it.”
To the dismay of the rest of us, Gwennie and her activist friends had nothing but contempt for Barack Obama these days, her own current mantra being, “We knew he was going to sell us down the river as soon as he put Summers and Geithner on his economic team. Talk about putting the foxes in charge of the chickens.” I’d thought it a pretty interesting analogy, since, if you believed Sammie, Barack Obama was the foxiest president ever. She should know. She’d actually met the man. She and Jacob had sat next to him at a North American Federation of Temple Youth luncheon,
and he’d gripped her shoulder excitedly when she mentioned she was in Jungian analysis. They actually carried on a conversation about the collective unconscious and synchronicity before he got up to make his speech about the covenant between Israel and the American people.
But, as usual, I digress. The current silence of the Fiske house gave Adam and me a chance to bask quietly in each other’s presence. If the enjoyment of shared silence and shared secrets are the measure of comfort in a relationship, then Adam was my alpha and omega. I’d been more disappointed than I’d cared to confess that we’d spent the holidays and my birthday apart for the first time since Mother and Nana and Dhani and Ignacio and Cook and Sister Flatulencia and Fayga and Ignacio and even Father and I had moved to New York from the Main Line. But I knew it would be hypocritical to criticize his intention to travel to Florida to finally meet Lisa Trooly’s family when I myself had gotten engaged first.
As we shared a nice long stare from either end of the sofa, I worried about those dark circles under his eyes. I would personally wring Lisa Trooly’s neck if she’d contributed to them. I decided I quite fancied the new facial hair below his bottom lip and just managed to stifle the impulse to reach across the couch to touch it. Instead, I rolled off the sofa, landing with the elegance of an elephant, and offered to brew us some Peet’s Major Dickason’s blend. Adam followed me out of the room and companionably leaned against the kitchen counter as I fetched coffee beans from the freezer and turned out half of Gwennie’s cabinets to find a fresh filter. While the water heated in the coffee maker, I led him out to the backyard to say hello to the Austins, who dropped pink and apricot petals right and left in little bursts of exhibitionism. Jillily soon found her way outside and, seeing I was with one of her oldest friends, wove in and out of Adam’s legs, purring like a house afire as he extolled her beauty. Actually, it was pretty embarrassing, watching her lap up his praise in her most vulnerable Charlotte the Harlot pose, flat on her back with her legs spread wide and paws aloft. I waited for Adam to explain why he’d come out west, but he said nothing. I decided to let him take his time.
“Sooo,” I said, “now that Assefa’s back in town, he keeps calling me. But why should I talk to him? He broke my heart.”
Adam’s voice crunched like tires on gravel. “I know what you mean.”
I dropped the basket onto the ground. “She didn’t.”
He hung his head. “She did.”
“Oh, Adam.” For once, I was the one to comfort him. We sprawled together on the dewy grass, his head in my lap, and I stroked his perfect forehead while he cried, the sound of it harsh and juddering. Was it wrong that I felt terribly grown up returning the kindness he’d shown me, a stranger in a cemetery, nine years and fifty-six days ago?
How ironic that it was Adam who ultimately convinced me to call Assefa back. He delivered it as an afterthought once his tears had petered out and we’d ingested enough caffeine to power a couple of 747s. (And if you’re curious, as I was, where the phrase “petered out” originated, I can happily direct you to the French word péter, which refers both to breaking wind and exploding—in Sister Flatulencia’s case, virtually identical—culminating in péter dans la main, or coming to nothing.)
At any rate, in the manner of scientists the world over, Adam shifted from the fickleness of Lisa Trooly to the impossibility of taking on Eridanus without skipping much of a beat, until finally, when he realized he was going to be late for a scheduled lunch date with Tom and Amir, he took his coffee mug to the sink, rinsed it out, and turned to deliver the following advice: “Call him. Look at whatever he says as just so much more data. You’ve got to meet whatever reality brings, Fleur. Denial’s as ludicrous as a cat with a feather in its mouth, saying, ‘Bird? What bird?’”
My hand automatically went to my belly. Like those treacherous chutes in the game Chutes and Ladders, Adam’s words sent me right back in time to my pregnancy at thirteen years of age, which I’d barely terminated within the legal limit, thanks to my denial that Mr. Heavyflow had gone missing.
As it had now. And really, I didn’t know which was worse: the thought that I might have incurred yet another unwanted pregnancy or that, if it proved to be so, I wouldn’t know for certain without a DNA test if the father was Assefa or Bob Ballantine.
Chapter Fifteen
Assefa
I DIDN’T BLAME Fleur for not responding to my messages. Why was I even calling her? What could I possibly say that would compensate for the hurt I had caused? The first time I pressed the starred key that would select her number from my contacts, I told myself that I did so because of our mothers’ connection, that it would be damnably awkward for the two of us to be on non-speaking terms. But the truth was that this Hanging Man had returned to Los Angeles still hanging: suspended now between two yawning pits of loss—an existential doubling of what Fleur might have called the void.
Clamoring within me were sorrow, self-blame, and guilt over what would befall Makeda with only an aging ex-priest as her comrade, along with the sensation of an iron gate closing with an inexorable fixity against hope and desire. I’d known at the time that Makeda’s plea to forget her was sheer folly—really, a bad joke. While her physical proximity had receded into that other universe that was Ethiopia, I knew I would grieve her forever, along with the eviscerating second loss of my native land. Tikil Dingay’s vast skies and animal cries, its vibrantly colored buildings, even the tongue-daring taste of toasted injera soaked in shirro all conspired to urge me inward. Proust had known exactly what he was talking about. Each way I turned in my suddenly much-too-large duplex, in the food aisles of Ralph’s, on my daily walk from the parking lot to the Ronald Reagan U.C.L.A. Medical Center, I was overcome by the sensation of being lost, the feeling that something was missing. Where were the aromatic teff fields, burning eucalyptus leaves, pervasive tang of bunna, and the permeating ubiquity of jasmine, frankincense, animal dung? The musk exuded by Ethiopian skin?
But to be perfectly honest—not the easiest thing for a Hanging Man—it was on my ride in the passenger seat of Enat’s gray Acura from the Tom Bradley International Terminal to my parents’ home that it dawned on me that Los Angeles presented a hopelessly dull palette without the crooked grin, penetrating blue eyes, luscious alabaster curves, and tantalizing honey scent of Fleur. And so, robbed of rhyme or reason or passion, I went about my business, inwardly disengaged and listless.
But my state of suspension gave way to a more turbulent twisting and writhing on the morning Abat and Enat interrupted my preparations for my shower by knocking on my bedroom door and leading me wordlessly into Medr’s room. Dear God, I wondered, had my grandfather died? But no, here he was, sitting propped up in his bed, wearing his best turquoise silk pajamas with a colorful Lion of Judah emblazoned over his heart. A trio of our wooden dining chairs had been arranged in a semi-circle facing him, and Medr gestured authoritatively with his wizened old hand for the three of us to sit down. Which we did, as promptly as students in a classroom, the sound of our chair legs scraping the wood floor like fingernails against chalkboard. I darted glances at my parents, but they kept their eyes averted from me and doggedly faced my father’s father.
I found myself wanting to leave the room, but knew that it was not possible. When I’d first alighted from my plane, Enat had greeted me as if she’d thought I had died and had only just learned I was among the living. Her tears were so copious that I tasted the salt of them long after she’d showered my face with a thousand kisses. She’d come to pick me up alone. I only saw Abat once we returned home. Leaning back in his favorite plush chair, he watched me carry in three heavy suitcases filled to near overflowing with gifts I’d brought home for family and friends. Before my journey (and his), he would have leapt up to help me. Now his unsmiling immobility told me I had not been forgiven for my rash words at the orphanage. He expressed no curiosity about what had led me to change my mind and return.
I presumed he hadn’t mentioned our angry conversation to
Enat, who busied herself for days joyously unpacking the shammas I’d brought back for her, running into my room at all hours to extol this or that particularly vivid border. I’d felt especially pleased to see the broad smiles on her face; I’d chosen each shamma with care, this one because its rich orange and sienna diamond design reminded me of the ornamental combs I’d seen displayed across the top of an old dresser in Makeda’s humble room, that one because its bright reds and purples were like the red-hot poker flowers and hagenias that grew from the rich soil of Tikil Dingay.
But something serious had clearly taken place between then and now. Both Mother and Father were avoiding not only my eyes, but each other’s, and Medr’s face displayed, if possible, even more grief than it habitually wore. To my astonishment, my grandfather opened his mouth and began to speak. The sound of his voice was initially as faint as a dying kudu, but after a few scratchy words and a tinny cough or two, I could hear him just fine. Once it became clear what he was saying, I wished I couldn’t.
He spoke in Amharic, but I was able to follow him fairly well. Too well. “My son,” he said, rubbing his creased forehead repetitively with his thumb, “this life is never what we expect and often requires of us what we do not want. Your abat has confessed to me something I only suspected when he first informed me that we would all be coming to this new land. It concerns things we should not have to speak about, but I have convinced him and your mother that, if this family is to bring forward the fruit of further generations, speak of them we must.” His voice was growing more faint again, as if flagging from the strain of underuse. He managed a final, “Your abat has something to tell you. My son has something to tell you.” Then the room fell silent but for the soft sobbing of Enat, who rocked from side to side like a caged animal.