Scent of Butterflies (23 page)

Butterfly's eyes dart around to seek a safer place. Her trembling legs take small backward steps, but there's nowhere to flee.

I grab her hand. Force her back into her chair.

Aziz pulls a crumpled packet of cigarettes out of his coat pocket—Oshnoo, strong and filterless. It is his first cigarette since his arrival ninety-six hours, two-thousand eight-hundred and eighty minutes ago. He draws deeply, letting out a spiral of smoke behind which his narrowed eyes and pinched mouth obtain a haunted expression.

A white halo frames Butterfly's pale mouth, cleansed of the last trace of lipstick. She slides the cup toward her, but unable to summon the strength to lift, pushes it away, too close to the edge of the table.

I slide it back to safety.

My heart settles. My hands no longer tremble. My voice is calm now that we have arrived here at last, hurtling toward some uncertain but inevitable closure. “I want to know everything, Aziz.”

His once grand body succumbs to the seat cushions. “Why, Soraya? Why destroy the rest of what we have left together?”

“Not destroy, Aziz. Salvage.”

He wipes sweat off his face. “I came home early that day. I can't tell you how often I wished you'd been there instead of…”

“This, this…Parvaneh?”

“Yes.”

“What time of day was it?”

“What difference does it make now?”

“The exact time.”

“Early evening like now. We had lost power in the office. You were working.”

“What did you do first?”

“I changed, like always. Poured a glass of wine. Turned on the music. Read the papers.”

In the gathering dusk, in my garden, I listen with morbid interest, my rage mounting at his remembrance of every minute detail. When in love, the body secretes pheromones that sharpen the senses, alert the mind, and hone our sense of smell. When in hate, we suffer the same changes. I, too, will forever live with the memory etched in the crevices of my wounded heart, “The Blue Danube,” the stench of candles, their hungering mouths.

His cigarette burns his fingers. He tosses the butt underfoot and grinds it with his heel. His gaze seeks Butterfly, who is shrinking in her skin. Her eyes have lost their shine; her teeth have disappeared behind her tight-lipped expression. Aziz's furious fingers fish another cigarette out of the pack and drum it on the tabletop. “The doorbell rang and I thought you'd forgotten the key to the house. She was sobbing at the door. Problem with Hamid she wanted to discuss with you.”

I see Butterfly, timid and slightly sheepish, appear at the door and fall into my husband's arms as if he was the only safe haven remaining to her, the god who will wave a benevolent arm and wipe out all her troubles. I have known her far too long not to have witnessed the seductive, almost erotic moments of her vulnerability. Aziz is not to blame. Had she not trapped me into friendship in the same smooth, slick manner?

Aziz lights another cigarette with a flick of his lighter. “One moment we were sitting there discussing Hamid, the next…” He drops the lighter on the table. “Believe me, Soree. It had nothing to do with love.”

I fight with all of my might to maintain the fading remnants of my trust. I want so much to believe him, even though he is lying with a face wiped clean like a just-painted wall. “What then? What was it?” I ask the question, but pray that he'll have the dignity and wisdom not to answer.

He shuts his red-rimmed, dry eyes and rests his elbows on his knees, cradling his head between his hands. I want to reach out and stroke his hair that tumbles over his face, touch his eyes, this man whose pain and grief is tucked away so far and deep that he has forgotten how to cry. I wish you were man enough to cry, Aziz. If not now, then when? When is a good time to shed tears for our senseless loss?

He raises his head, and his stare slashes through me like a shock of ice water. “You really want the truth, Soraya?” He leans forward to make his point. “If you have to know, Parvaneh needed me that night, and it felt good, really good, because you never do.”

“And why is this bad?”

“A man,” he replies with a bitter smile, “wants his wife to need him. Your independence, Soraya, make me feel unnecessary sometimes.”

And instead of telling him how wrong he is and how very deeply I need him, even now that he has betrayed me, I lash out, swearing that I refuse to become my mother, who can only see herself in her husband's reflection. My mother, who can only exist under my father's overreaching shadow. “No, Aziz, I won't become a martyr and resort to deception. Become someone I am not.” I say this with defiance but little conviction because I
have
become my mother, after all.

Butterfly sobs in her cupped palms. The stench of civet grows stronger. She pulls the saucer with the cup of tea toward her. A stream of the caramel-colored liquid spills from the porcelain lip, trickles down the side of the cup, and pools in the saucer. She sets the cup back down again.

I push it further away from her, not wanting her to drink her tea before I am done with her, wanting nothing to break our fall until we land with a loud thud, sullied, bruised, and forever lost. “Don't try to fool me, Aziz. It wasn't that one night. You fucked her and kissed her and loved her for years and years. Parvaneh told me herself.”

“Please, Soraya,” she begs. “Don't.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Aziz's voice is almost lost beneath a series of intrusive barks from my owl.

“That Noruz night when Parvaneh ran into the streets. You remember, of course. She pretended to take a bottle of Valium and we rushed her to the hospital.”

“Soraya! Stop it! Not in front of Aziz,” she pleads.

“Why not, my friend? He is your lover, after all. The man you were ready to commit suicide for! Yes, Aziz, she told me she'd lost ‘her man,' her exact words that night. She said she hoped ‘her man' would pity her and resume the relationship once he found out she attempted suicide. But how would he find out, I asked, since only Hamid, you, Aziz, and I were there that night. Here's what she said: ‘He will find out. Trust me, he will.' And you did, Aziz. Of course you did. You were there.”

A roar, like the howl of an animal, reverberates in the garden. The cry of my husband's anger. And on his face an expression of utter shock and disbelief. “What in the world are you talking about?”

“
You
tell
me
!” I scream back.

The metal legs of his chair grate underfoot as he pushes away from the table. He looms over Butterfly, his anger more menacing than any curse. “What did you tell Soraya?”

Her face speckled with tears and mascara, she recoils from the furious flare of his eyes. Her hand crawls toward the teacup. I snatch it away from her and put it back on the table. Not now. Not now that Aziz and I are momentarily united, the sheer force of our rage about to annihilate her.

She jumps out of her chair and runs out of the gazebo, fleeing into the fecund canopy of eucalyptus.

The hiss of her fighting lungs, crackle of breaking branches, and snap of leaves under her steps alert us to her flight ahead as we follow her into the tangle of trees. Then silence. Such profound silence that Aziz and I stop and glance at one another. For a sweet instant I allow myself to believe that despite Butterfly, despite the lies, mine and his, he still belongs to me.

The sound of retching sends an orange cloud of quivering butterflies off the surrounding leaves.

Aziz's features harden again, dark and indifferent and remote.

I thrust the boughs aside, damp earth giving way under my shoes as I advance deeper into the creeping vegetation, the invasion of moss and fungi, the clamor of insects and flurry of Monarchs. Sunlight filters through the caving canopy of branches overhead, the low-limbed trees and dense tangle I break into.

Butterfly is doubled over with the effort to empty her stomach of an indigestible mountain of deception. Bile splashes against the slab of pink marble of the grave at the end of the grove and, like brown quicksilver, clings to the engraved gold letters—
Beloved
Friend
and
Husband, Your Memory Forever Lives
. She steps back, alarmed, trying to escape the grave, but heaves and coughs anew and retches on the block of marble until nothing is left but foam.

We wait, Aziz and I, observing Butterfly clutch her belly. She was not prepared for this. She thought she was going to get a holiday in Los Angeles. She thought there was nothing to do here except lounge about, gossip, and recharge herself for him.

She breaks eucalyptus leaves off a nearby branch and wipes her mouth.

I am struck by a fresh wave of grief. I step closer and lean over her. “Parvaneh?” The smell of mud, vomit, and deceit is nauseating.

Her face is streaked by splintered shadows of branches and strands of hair loosened from her braid. Her neck is mottled red.

“How often did you fuck my husband? Weeks? Years? Every single day?”

“Tell Soraya the truth!” Aziz booms.

Butterfly rises and leans against me, resting her head on my shoulder as if it is old times and we are in the hospital after her stomach has been pumped of nothing.

Mosquitoes buzz around my ears. I slap one dead against my cheek. I want Aziz to wipe off the bloody mark, a small affectionate gesture. But embroiled in his own theatricals, he continues to feign ignorance and demand the truth from her.

She lets out a great sigh. Falls lifeless on the scattered leaves underfoot.

“No!” I scream, shaking her. “Breathe, Parvaneh, breathe.” I want her conscious and accountable. I want to watch her squirm and writhe and suffer. I want to serve her a nice, large glass of Amorphophallus tea.

I wipe her face clean with the palm of one hand. She will recover, this catlike woman with more than nine lives.

I struggle with her weight as we walk out of the claustrophobic grasp of trees and the grave that moans and sighs behind our retreating steps.

Aziz grunts and I am not sure whether he is concerned for his lover or doesn't understand why I am helping her. I am certain he wouldn't want me to leave her among the eucalyptus, lifeless and soiled in mud and vomit. He refuses to lend me a hand as, with great difficulty, I maneuver her limp body into a chair in the gazebo. I adjust her collar, push her wet hair off her face, and stop myself from offering to apply lipstick on her pale mouth to honor a semblance of decorum. I fill a teacup with water from the fountain and rinse her face, pat her dry with my sleeve.

She is not allowed oblivion. Not yet. Not in this world.

“How long have you been fucking my husband, Parvaneh?”

I sit here in the gazebo, wedged between Butterfly and Aziz, demanding an answer from my stone-faced friend.

Frogs croak and crickets scurry among the carpet of flowers. Minutes or hours pass—time has lost its meaning—as I reflect upon our losses, Aziz's, Butterfly's, and mine. I am torn between wanting to wrap a consoling arm around my friend's narrow shoulders or else stabbing her blind with sharp fingernails. I long to offer Aziz a glass of rosewater sherbet, long to bring a spark of life back to his eyes, even as I want to prolong this painful wait that is stickier than
gaz
nougat.

Outside, unexpected winds swallow the breeze, and beyond the hills, the sky is heavy with convoluted clouds. Night is falling. A chill in the air. Tea is brewing in the teapot. When all is told, we will have the rest of our messy lives to resettle at our homes, search for a sanctuary in foreign lands, or ask for absolution in other worlds.

I steal a glance at my owl, begging for her approval. She has not moved from her post by the steaming samovar. She continues to gauge me with huge eyes, the fiery shade of hammered gold, seething with wrath and wisdom. I want her to flutter and bark and groan, fly away if she has nothing better to offer than this incriminating silence.

Butterfly and Aziz's bodies are turned away from each other like rattlesnakes coiled into themselves. When secrets are exposed, lovers become enemies, unable to face one another. Aziz's once inebriated eyes are sober, his once plump mouth is a threat. A cigarette is idle between his fingers.

I want to stroke his pale face, the dark shadow under his chin, bring drunkenness back to his beautiful eyes. I want to touch my lips to the artery at the side of his neck that pumps nervous blood and tell him that I need him more than he will ever understand. I move my chair closer to Butterfly and study her for a long time. She knows I want the truth, knows that I have it in me to wait forever if necessary, that I will not release her until I hear every painful detail of how she robbed me of everything I hold dear.

She tugs at the collar of her blouse as if it's suffocating her. “No, Soraya! I won't say another word. You can't make me.”

Aziz's voice startles us all. “Talk, woman! You are killing Soraya!”

Butterfly stares at the strands of hairs she pulled from her head. “
Khodaya
! God! It's bad. You don't understand.”

I believe her. I certainly do. It will be bad, this spilling out of secrets. Once she uncorks herself, she will not hold back the most painful details until nothing is left but the remnants of our ruined lives.

My owl's head rotates a full circle. Its weary eyes reflect disgust as they come to rest on Butterfly as if to say: here we go, at last.

Butterfly's breath permeates the gazebo with the biting odor of civet. Her low voice silences the clamor in the garden. “Aziz told you the truth. That evening…in your house…it never happened again. It was a terrible mistake.”

They all say that, don't they? The cheaters with their roaming eyes. Thieves with filching hands. All of them, with their wandering hearts, they all say it was a terrible mistake and expect a forgiving kiss on their erogenous spot in the center of their foolish little heads.

“You have to believe me, Soraya!” She pants as if she has been running for hours to reach this place. “This…this…our…Aziz and me. It only happened once.”

“You lie,” I cry out. “I don't believe you!”

“It's the truth, Soraya. It's no excuse, I know. Even that I'll regret until I die.”

I shut her down with a piercing glare and a gesture of my raised hand. “What about the Noruz you pretended to take sleeping pills to scare Aziz? Do you think I forgot that?”

“
Khodaya
! God! It's not what you think, Soraya.”

“Really! Then why wouldn't you tell me his name? Tell me who he is?”

In the twilight, her face is the hue of the jasmine creepers that claw their way up and around the gazebo like thieves in the night. She clutches the Buccellati brooch forgotten on the table, nicks the tip of her finger on the wing of the phoenix, and lets out a small cry. A drop of blood sprouts on her finger. She licks it with the tip of her tongue.

I grab her face between my hands and hiss right into her lying eyes, “Tell the truth! Or I'll strangle you in front of your lover.”

“Back off, Soraya!” Aziz roars. “Let the woman speak!”

My owl hops to the edge of the table and cocks her head. Her round-eyed stare sweeps the length of our bodies. She tosses her head this way and that, and then, to the accompaniment of a low rumble emanating from deep inside, rotates her neck one full circle, the back of her head dismissing us.

“I want to die,” Butterfly groans. “I caused you such pain, Soraya…and now…Oh! God! Are you sure? Just tell me to shut up! It's better than the truth.”

The winds howl in my ears. A chill pierces my bones and settles in my marrow. Perhaps I should not solicit added grief, should not replace suspicion with certainty that will lead to more pain. Yet I open my mouth like a dumb marionette and say: “I want to know everything, Parvaneh. Everything!”

“It was another man, Soraya.”

“I don't believe you. If it was, why would you keep him a secret from me?”

“Because I can't tell you.”

“Of course you won't tell me you are fucking my husband!”

Aziz curls his hands into fists and I think he might strike her. “You are a cruel woman, Parvaneh! Cruel and shameless. Tell the truth. Now! Or I'll kick you back to where you came from!”

“All right! If you want to know I'll tell you.” Disjointed words seep through her lips. “The other man, Soraya…the other man…” She stares directly at me, as frightened as I've ever seen her. “The other man was your Baba.”

I jump up. My chair topples behind me with a dull clang. “Baba? Baba!
My
father?”

Aziz towers over Butterfly and shouts, “You
doroughgou
liar! How dare you!”

“I don't believe you either,” I scream. “You evil woman. My Baba would never have an affair with someone his daughter's age. Why, Parvaneh? Why are you lying like this?”

Her fingernails draw bloody threads along her cheeks. “I wish it was a lie, Soraya. Remember when Baba became interested in your flowers? When he asked for the copper planter you bought in Paris, the one engraved with the dragon and bamboo shoots?”

Of course, I remember. Every one of my plants and their containers are etched in the archives of my memory. But how could Butterfly, who'd never stepped into my greenhouse, know the flowerpot I had purchased from Marché aux Puces?

“You planted Silver Beads in it, didn't you? The plant has silvery leaves and black stems.”

“Daddy Long Legs!” Aziz murmurs, exchanging a glance with me. But this time we don't laugh at our secret joke. The tangled stems that looked like our chief rabbi's signature don't strike us as funny anymore. I lavished such care on this plant that Aziz threatened to “dismember his rival.”

Aziz draws from his cigarette. Smoke drifts out of his mouth and spirals in front of his face. The spark of shared understanding is extinguished.

“Baba wanted the plant for me,” Butterfly says, “as well as the other ones you gave him. Go back and trace the dates he asked you for a plant or some type of flower. The dates fall on my birthday.”

Her words settle in my bones like toxic mercury. Fragments click and connect like synapses, every incident, every detail becoming transparent with fresh meaning. Long-ago events should have alerted me. I should have suspected that day when Baba began driving Butterfly home from high school. When he, who never meddled in other people's lives, went on a crusade to punish Aunt Tala. When he started to visit my greenhouse and show interest in my plants. And I should have suspected something when Baba changed his will in favor of Butterfly.

Yes, I ought to have suspected that Butterfly, too, in her own timid way, was on a journey to shape herself into the woman Baba admired, meek and dependent and clinging to his every word.

But above all, I should have known that when Madar, in silence and without explanation, moved out of Baba's bed, a momentous event had forced her to acknowledge defeat at last, transform herself into a martyr, and bury her pain under a carapace of silence. We each react differently to betrayal.

Butterfly's voice comes from somewhere far away, a calm tone that comes with the knowledge that there's nothing left to hide. “Soraya, it was all my fault. Baba was like my father and mother in one. The family I never had. I was lonely. He helped me become a woman. No! Please, wait. Not only in that way.”

My shoulders ache under the weight of the arm Aziz wraps around me. My eyes burn; my lips are chapped. I raise one hand and command Butterfly to stop. “I would have recognized my plants in your house. I never saw any.”

“He gave me a spare key to his secret apartment. I kept the plants there.”

“Baba has a secret apartment?” I say this once. Then again. And once again. Snap! The last frayed remnants of my denial break.

A mascara-tainted tear rolls down the corner of Butterfly's eye.

We share another moment, Aziz and I. No need for words. The dining-room set with high-backed chairs, the china plates and teacups with the design of tiny irises, the queen-size bed with the carved walnut headboard, these were not to help Baba furnish his partner's bachelor pad. They were for his secret apartment.

“Don't blame Baba. Please, don't.” Butterfly repeats it a few times, and I don't know if she's trying to convince me or herself. “I became so clingy. Refused to let go. I wanted something of what you had. He was horrified when Madar became suspicious. He stopped seeing me after that. I reacted like a spoiled child who had lost another father. So, I pretended to kill myself. Oh, Soraya, what did I do? I betrayed everyone I love!
Elahi
bemiram
, I want to die.”

Winds make their way into the gazebo, seep through my forming cracks, and whistle in my guts, dashing through my veins and swelling everything out of shape. Nothing looks the same. My garden that once throbbed with life is curdled with regrets now. Their world gutted, the butterflies have lost their luster and droop listless on dull fauna and flora.

A subtle shadow flutters at my peripheral vision, and my
Morgheh
Hagh
comes to life like a forgotten wish. She levitates above our table, and I wonder if she is flapping her wings in a silent farewell. I don't blame her. Why would she remain behind to witness this unfolding insanity? For once, Mamabozorg was wrong. This Owl of Reason did not settle in my garden to bring good luck.

She whooshes past me, soars over and above Aziz, grazes Butterfly's hair, then sails ahead to hover in place at the threshold of the gazebo. Behind, the remnant of a bloody sunset stains the horizon.

I ignore my owl, draw a deep breath, and summon the strength to lift Butterfly's cup. It is lukewarm, useless, and undrinkable. I empty the tea underfoot and, for an instant, expect the poisonous brew to bore a hole into the earth.

“Sit, Soraya!” Aziz says. “No one wants tea.”

I turn my back to him, lift the teapot, and pour my friend a cup of fresh tea, strong and dark and lethal. This she deserves and more, I argue with myself. She deserves this for what she did to us—me, Aziz, Baba, and my Madar who suffered in silence all these years. But what about Baba? What about the wiser, more experienced accomplice? Does he deserve to die, too?

I tell myself I'm here now, on the other side of the world, and don't care if I'll ever see him again. But I do. I care very much. I tell myself to forget this selfish man who betrayed Madar and, in the process, tainted my relationship with her. Forget this man who did not even have the decency to keep his slimy hands off a clingy, immature girl. But even as I say this, I know that I will never forget my Baba.

Butterfly holds the cup of hot tea between her hands. She stares into the dark liquid as if baffled by my inexplicable gesture of hospitality. Her lips touch the rim of the cup.

A hard fist forms in my stomach.

My owl zooms past me and with brutal force lands on Butterfly's forearm.

She screams as hot tea spills over her breasts and splashes on her thighs. She collapses on spattered tea, her face squashed against broken shards of china on the tabletop. When she raises her face, it is a network of fine, bloody cuts. “I'm to blame, Soraya. Baba didn't want to…well, it doesn't really matter now.”

In that she is right. Nothing matters now. The cup is shattered. Tea spilled. The stink of burnt Amorphophallus leaves scream from the teapot that sizzles and spits dry on the neck of the samovar. They can all explode into a consuming fire, for all I care—the teapot and the samovar, as well as this gazebo.