The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (13 page)

Naomi met all of their attention, sincere and good-natured as it may have been, with a fake grin that they took to be a mark of shyness. I knew better. Once, as one of the men was walking out of the store, I saw her roll her eyes and heard her whisper, “Take a bath.” The man, whom I knew only as Mr. Clark, paused just slightly at the door when she said that. Like all of the other men, he was old enough to have been her father or grandfather. He wore thick glasses taped together in the center, and the same pair of rumpled brown pants that hit his ankles just an inch too high. His hair had gone mostly gray, and on warmer days he passed his afternoons sleeping on one of the benches surrounding General Logan. I didn’t know him to be a good, or bad, man. I knew only that every day he chose to lose himself in as many bottles of alcohol as he could afford rather than waste his energy facing his life head on. When he turned his head toward her, there was a resigned sadness to his expression that neither Naomi nor I could bear to look at. His face seemed to say that if given half a chance, he would have done anything not to be judged by this eleven-year-old girl who wore pink cashmere.

When we finished reading just after lunch, Naomi refused to go back home. Rather than leave the store she asked, “So what do we do now?”

It was easy enough to invent small tasks to keep her with me. On the first day of her vacation I gave her a broom that she pushed up and down the aisles. She was meticulous. She swept each piece of tile once, and then twice, as if she were brushing an ancient artifact free of centuries of dust and sand. She swept the floor underneath the lowest shelves, which had rarely seen the bristles of a broom.

“This place is filthy,” Naomi said. And while I may have been hurt just slightly by her judgment, I also wanted to make it better for her so I could be rewarded with a hundred mornings and afternoons just like this one.

Judith came as usual to pick Naomi up at five or a few minutes before. On that first day, Naomi saw her mother just before she came in. At the last second, she picked up her copy of
The Brothers Karamazov
and in that same insistent voice of hers said, “Come on, Mr. Stephanos, one more chapter.” I saw Judith walking across the street, just steps away. I grabbed the book from Naomi’s hands and turned to a random page near the beginning.

“Fyodor Karamazov,” I continued without looking up as Judith entered the store. She paused just inside the door, while Naomi leaned over the counter with one hand resting on her chin as if she were reading the pages with me. When I looked up I saw Naomi trying as hard as she could to act as if she were listening. We had become accomplices.

“So,” Judith said after a few seconds of standing in the doorway and watching us pretend to read. “I see she even has you reading to her now.” She had her arms folded over her chest and was leaning slightly against the wall. She hadn’t caught on to the act we were putting on, but she wasn’t completely fooled, either.

I closed the book and acted as if I were noticing her for the first time.

“We’ve been taking turns,” I said.

“Is that true, Naomi?”

Naomi nodded her head vigorously.

“Pull up a chair and join us,” I offered.

“Depends on what you’re reading.”

I showed Judith the cover of the book.

“A little dense, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t pick it out. Naomi did.”

“Of course she did. How else could she keep you reading to her for hours?”

I wanted to applaud Naomi for her foresight. Judith and I were both being conned, but neither of us particularly minded. To earn that kind of trust and affection from a child is to find out that you may have just been a better person than you believed all along.

“So is that why we’re reading this?” I asked Naomi.

She did what few children could have done. She looked me directly in the eye and said, “Yes.”

“We have to go now, though,” Judith said. “It’s getting late and we have dinner plans.”

“One more chapter,” Naomi pleaded.

“Tomorrow,” Judith said. “Tomorrow you can stay as long as you like.”

Tomorrow did not come fast enough, but when it finally did arrive after a restless night, I was ready. I had called Joseph as soon as I returned home so I could explain everything that had happened to him.

“Tell me again now, what did she say when she left the store?” he asked me.

“She said, ‘You can stay as long as you like.’”

There was a long stretch of silence on Joseph’s end as he deliberated over the meaning of Judith’s words.

“What else did she say?” he asked.

“That was it.”

“Was she smiling at you?”

“No. She may have, and I just missed it.”

I could almost see Joseph shaking his head on the other end of the phone. He breathed in deeply and sighed loudly enough for me to hear him.

“What do you know about this woman?” he asked me.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I know plenty.”

“Don’t get mad at me, Stephanos. I’m just asking you simple questions. Relationships with women are tricky. Trust me. I know about these things. You’ve never dated an American before.”

Joseph was kind enough not to remind me that since coming to America I had never had a relationship of any kind beyond brief one-night encounters.

“American women are different,” he continued. “Remember that. You never know what’s in their hearts.”

He was talking like a scorned lover. I thought of him in his restaurant, as the Rouge that he had known years earlier in a different life sat at a table with a crowd of people eating, laughing, while he sat hiding in the back.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ll be fine. I know what I’m doing.”

After we hung up the phone I went back to my bathroom mirror. I stared hard and long at my reflection. I ran my hands through my hair and turned my head from one side to the other. I was determined to find something that someone like Judith could describe as beautiful. It seemed entirely possible if I turned my head the right way, smiled the proper smile, and made sure the light hit my face at the correct angle. I lifted up my chin and turned my head a few degrees to the left. I smiled with only the right side of my face. I washed my face, dried it, and then washed it again. With each blink a new face looked back at me, simultaneously handsome and grotesque and nondescript. Who was I? That was all I wanted to know.

The following morning I read three chapters to Naomi. Afterward we rearranged all the items on the shelves. We threw away the cans of expired food buried in the back, brushed the dust off the boxes of cereal, and chipped away at the ice in the freezer. After two days of her being there, the store looked better than it had in years. The aisles were clean; each item faced in the proper direction. I swept the old condom and candy wrappers that littered the ground in front of the store and in the alley. I added a touch of white paint to the northwest corner of the store, where the paint had peeled back in long thin strips to reveal an even older coat of faded lime green paint. I tightened the screws on the shelves that had begun to sag from neglect. I even replaced the fluorescent light bulbs that had long since begun to dim. They had given the store a muted, faded look that I had thought of as somehow fitting, but now, with Naomi in the store, I felt eager, even anxious to make it a place that I wasn’t afraid to look at. At the end of the afternoon, when I stopped and looked back on all that we had done, I felt the pride of ownership that Americans always speak of with such reverence.

At four I started to count down the minutes until Judith arrived. I wanted her to see what I had done with the store, to marvel in approval, to see the hidden potential behind the shabby exterior.

At four-twenty I began to ask Naomi questions.

“How is your mother doing?”

“Fine.”

“Do you have any dinner plans tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did she say anything to you about it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Can you remember her saying she had anywhere to go tonight?”

“No.”

“Think,” I said. “Did she say anything at all?”

I felt the desperation in my voice and backed down at the last second. Naomi eyed me suspiciously. I paid her back with a candy bar that she hid in the inside pocket of her coat.

When Judith finally arrived, prompt as usual at five minutes before five, she came bearing tea and hot chocolate. She carried them over in two metal thermoses that came with spill-proof lids and ergonomically curved chrome handles. In her purse, she carried teacups and a little jar of honey. She opened the door with a “Surprise,” and then quickly went to work setting out the cups and drinks on the counter.

“What’s the occasion?” I asked her.

“No occasion,” she said. “But I figured if we were going to read, there was no reason why we couldn’t do it properly.”

I noted the “we” in her last sentence. I held on to it and told myself that I would use it against Joseph later. “We were going to read,” I would tell him. We.

Judith poured tea for the two of us, and a cup of hot chocolate for Naomi.

“I figured you had milk and sugar in the store,” she said. “But I can’t ever remembering seeing any honey.”

She was right. I didn’t carry any honey. I had sold the last bottle of it three, maybe four years ago and never thought of ordering any more.

The three of us sipped our tea and hot chocolate just as the sun was setting for the day. The first of the evening commuters were beginning to rush past the store on their way home, traffic was building up along the circle and on Massachusetts Avenue, and the temperature was a moderate 36 degrees, just cool enough to lend a certain urgency to returning home at the end of the day. We had managed to avoid all of that, like three prisoners locked in a comfortable cell that afforded them a view of a world they no longer cared to join. I remember looking out the window of the store and watching men and women walk briskly with their coats and scarves wrapped around their necks and feeling a certain pity for them.

Business always thinned out shortly after six, when the last of the rush-hour commuters finally made their way home. Rather than try to read through the interruptions, Judith and Naomi simply waited for me around the counter while I tended to the last customers of the day. The two of them sat on opposing silver stools salvaged from the garbage. They even held their cups delicately the same way: with one finger looped around the handle and the other hand used to support the base and side. From the back I watched Naomi as she timed her sips to match her mother’s.

At half-past six I quietly turned the sign to “Closed” without dimming any of the lights or locking the door. I took my place behind the counter. Judith suggested that we take turns reading.

“You read one page,” she said. “And then I’ll read the next.”

“And what about Naomi?”

“She can pretend she’s still paying attention.”

We read back and forth for half an hour that night, until all the tea had been drunk and Naomi had taken to swirling her finger in the bottom of her cup. For those thirty minutes I had it all, and perhaps if I had been a wiser man I would have been content with just that.

9

B
y the time the train pulls into the Silver Spring station, I am one of only four people left in the car. We’re spread out evenly between the rear and the front, as if we have chosen sides in some childish debate and are refusing to meet in the middle. I wish empty trains inspired more recklessness in the people forced to share them. There’s a solitude and isolation that come with knowing that out of everyone you had begun your journey with, only you and the few faces across the aisle are left. That alone seems enough to make a connection, but as it stands, the opposite is always true. The empty space, whether it’s only a few feet or the entire car, becomes impassable. Perhaps it’s the embarrassment of being alone, the fear of being exposed, and the risk of losing one’s anonymity that make us shy away from one another precisely when we should feel emboldened. I can’t even bring myself to look at the woman facing me from the other end of the car. That’s how naked a nearly empty train can make me feel.

It’s still the middle of the day, and despite the growing heat I’ve decided to walk to my uncle’s apartment. The walk to the apartment complex is a hostile one. The sidewalk narrows to a silver streak of cracked concrete that runs adjacent to a four-lane road densely populated with extended city buses and a continuous stream of cars. I always feel like a sad, pathetic creature while walking along this road. The world seems entirely unfit to handle my skinny, long-legged body, and the curious, often hostile glares of the drivers in their cars confirm it. Today, though, I’ve decided to seek pleasure wherever I can, which means finding comfort in the exhaust-choked air, and in the strain I feel while struggling up the steep incline that leads to the Silver Rock complex where my uncle lives.

I can imagine his surprise and gratitude at my unexpected visit. He will want to make tea for the both of us. He will insist on feeding me whatever he has in his refrigerator, even though he won’t have anything to offer besides leftovers from whatever Ethiopian restaurant he ate at the night before. Before I can tell him anything about my life, he will want to hear everything he can about my mother and brother. He will want the details of their health and about my brother’s plans for the future now that he has graduated college. When I tell him that they are both doing well, he will kiss the air and thank God, at least twice, for His grace. I know that he will reprimand me gently, and with good humor, for not having visited him sooner. He will shake his head, rub his hand across his nearly bald head, and then blame himself for being guilty of the same crime. When he speaks, he will do so slowly and deliberately, carefully choosing each word because he is nothing if not an exceptionally thoughtful man. I will assure him that the absence is entirely my fault; that I’ve been distracted with work, which is still going okay (another kiss to the air and a single “thank God”). Regardless of what I say, he will stomp one foot firmly on the ground and in the end insist that no, I am his responsibility, and therefore I can claim none of the guilt for my own. Ever since I dropped out of school, he has tried hard to hide his disappointment. He worries about my future, and yet he’s always played a part in reassuring my mother about the quality and state of my life. When he asks me about the store, I will tell him that I have plans for selling it. Or I will tell him I’ve already looked into selling it. Or that I already have someone interested in taking it off my hands. Anything to reassure him.