The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (16 page)

“I can’t imagine anything better,” I told her.

That was the only time either one of us spoke directly to the other about what we wanted. I almost regretted being so up front until I saw her smile at my response. There’s something physical that changes with a person’s appearance when they suddenly open up to you. For Judith, that change occurred almost exclusively in her eyes, which generally never rested for too long on any one person or object, unless it was Naomi. Now, though, she met my eyes with hers and did not back down.

I closed the store early for the third time so that we could eat our food before it got too cold. I pulled down the metal grate and turned the blinds and shut off the fluorescent lights. We used the lamp that I kept behind the counter and lit a row of tea candles that until then had been covered in dust. The light gave the store a warmth and glow that I had thought of as being reserved exclusively for homes.

We talked about Dostoyevsky and
The Brothers Karamazov
over dinner. Naomi and I spent a few minutes working out the pronunciation of the characters and author.

“Fee-a-door,” I told her. “Like Theodore.”

“Or fee at the door,” Naomi offered.

“Yes. As in, from now on you have to pay a fee at the door before you can come and read in my store.” Naomi shook her head and tried not to smile at my terrible joke, but I stared at her with my arms open until finally she relented and laughed even as she continued to shake her head.

“He was in jail once, wasn’t he?” Judith asked me.

“Briefly,” I told her. “After he was arrested he was carried into the city square, where he was supposed to be executed. They had the nooses all set, and it wasn’t until the last moment that it was revealed to be a hoax. He spent four years in jail after that.”

Naomi had a hard time understanding that story. She asked us why the government would do that to someone. Judith tried to explain to her that governments were no different from people, and that what they wanted, more than anything else, was to protect themselves. “Dostoyevsky,” she said, “was a threat to them, and they wanted to get rid of him without having to kill him.” Naomi couldn’t understand that either, though, how one man could threaten an entire government just by writing.

“Maybe he couldn’t,” I told Naomi. “But somebody out there could, and until you know who it is, it’s better just to scare everyone.”

Our answers still weren’t enough. There was a logical “why?” that could be attached to every response we came up with, and it seemed too harsh to say that terrible things happen to people for no reason other than they have to happen to someone. Finally Judith gave in and admitted what we had both been thinking.

“I don’t ultimately know why,” she said. “It’s just one of those things about life.”

Naomi accepted this answer, I suspect in part because she had heard it before. There was enough resignation in Judith’s voice and enough resilience and determination in her daughter’s to arrive at the truth, to make it clear that they had had conversations that ended like this one before.

After dinner we drove to the Mall in Judith’s car to see the National Christmas Tree. It was Judith’s idea. She said she wanted to see something that reminded her that Christmas was just a little more than a week away. There were hundreds of spectators surrounding the tree when we arrived, as if they were all expecting it to do something more than just stand there and twinkle in the darkness. I lifted Naomi into the air a few times so she could get a better view. Judith slipped her arm into the crook of my elbow and the three of us circled the tree once, and then twice.

When we returned home from the Mall, Judith invited me in for one last cup of tea. Naomi still had at least another hour before she had to go to bed and so she tugged on my arm and said in her high-pitched, pleading voice, “You have to come and see our tree.”

Judith had gone out of her way to create an elaborate Christmas pageantry in their living room for her daughter. The dining-room table had been pushed to the side to make way for a seven-foot tree that glittered obscenely in white lights. Two stockings with embroidered names were nailed to the mantel. More lights framed the back window, and stacked under the tree were three enormous boxes. Each was elegantly wrapped in green, white, and red, with a huge red bow tied to the top.

“Those are all from Naomi’s dad,” Judith said, pointing toward the boxes. “He likes his presents to be…ostentatious.”

I stared at the boxes and tried to guess their contents. It was obvious just from looking at them that whoever Naomi’s father may have been, and regardless of how far away he may have lived, he had me beat.

“And what about you?” I asked Judith. “What do you like?”

“I prefer simple and elegant.”

“I like small and cheap,” I said.

“That’s too bad,” Judith said. “It looks like you’ve gone and picked the wrong family.”

She said it without thinking, which I suppose was precisely what made it even worse. As soon as she said it she caught the look on my face and tried to take it back.

“Why did you say that?” I asked her.

“It was a joke,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

And I believed her; it had been a joke, but whether or not she meant it with the lightest intentions didn’t matter. I could see myself trying to measure up at family dinners and cocktail parties, and as a result, always falling short. How many times would I have to stare into a mirror and compare myself against Judith? I could go on second-guessing myself forever, and perhaps even find some consolation to the routine, but I saw now that all it would take was one fleeting moment of skepticism on her end to confirm all of my inadequacies, validate all of my doubts, and send me running back to the corner I came from. Our insecurities run far too deep and wide to be easily dismissed, and Judith, without knowing it, had hit that central nerve whose existence I was reluctant to admit, but that when tapped, sent a sudden shock of shame and humiliation beneath which everything else crumbled.

She tried again to recover. “Come on, I’m kidding,” she said.

Regardless of how hard she tried, there was no way she could take it back completely. I turned my head away from her. Naomi came up to me and led me by the hand to her presents.

“In here,” she said, pointing to the green box, “is a TV for my bedroom. And in here is a dollhouse from Germany. I don’t know what’s in the white one because that’s supposed to be a surprise.”

“Germany?” I said.

“That’s where he is right now,” Judith responded. “He’s teaching economics at a university there. Last year it was Greece, and the year before that Nairobi.”

“So he’s a professor?”

“That’s how we met,” she said. “He was a visiting professor from Mauritania.”

The picture was complete now. I could see him, Judith’s former husband and Naomi’s semiabsent father. I imagined a tall, sandy-skinned man with oval wire-rim glasses and smart, well-tailored suits like the ones my father used to wear. Someone who spoke with a crisp accent, whom women described as being gorgeous. I imagined academic conferences, family vacations on windswept beaches, and late-night dinner parties. A confident and assured voice that knew how to order wines, talk to salesclerks, and command the attention of a room. Someone I knew I could never stand against.

I took another look around at Judith’s living room, with its oversize Christmas tree and absurdly lavish presents. If what Judith wanted was another African to substitute for the one who had left her, then she was right, she had chosen poorly. I was not that man.

The teakettle began to whistle in the kitchen. It had a distinctive whistle to it, a singsong quality that was supposed to resemble, I imagine, an early morning birdsong.

“The tea’s ready,” Naomi said.

Judith walked over to her daughter and wrapped one arm protectively around Naomi’s neck. Naomi clasped her mother’s forearm to keep her from holding her too close.

“I think I should leave now,” I said.

Judith tried to hide her shock but a fraction of it was still there, if not entirely in her voice, then at least in the way she quickly turned her head up to look at me.

“You just got here. What about the tea?” she asked me.

“Maybe another time.”

I hated every word I said. Even as I spoke them I began the long process—one that would continue throughout the rest of that evening—of creating a series of different scenarios, ones that had me drinking tea on the couch and kissing Judith in the hallway. I couldn’t bear being in that living room any longer, stuffed as it was with relics of Judith’s former life, all of which pointed conclusively to distances too great to be crossed by a couple of dinners and over-the-counter banter. I wanted to take it back and start all over again, just as we had that evening in my apartment, but I knew that we had run out of roles to play.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But it’s getting late.”

“It’s only nine o’clock,” Judith pointed out.

“I know. But I have to wake up early tomorrow.”

“Okay, then. If that’s what you want.”

Judith was not one to beg, but of course I wish she had. Perhaps then I could have set aside enough of my injured pride and self-pity to stay. I picked my coat up off the couch. The teakettle whistled on. Judith stopped watching me. She focused all of her attention on her daughter. I put my coat on quickly. How were we supposed to say good-bye now? With a hug or handshake or a quick wave like casual acquaintances? Judith settled the question by sticking her hand out. I took it, and in doing so learned what it meant to feel your heart break.

“Good night,” she said.

“Good night,” I replied. “Good night, Naomi.”

“Good night, Mr. Stephanos.”

I let myself out. I walked down the steps, straight toward the circle. I took a seat on a bench across from General Logan. It was cold and only a few people were out. A group of teenage boys walked past me. They turned their attention to me briefly, but once they recognized me for the harmless man I knew myself to be, they moved on. Finally, after close to thirty minutes of sitting in the cold, a group of women in short black miniskirts and stiletto heels walked by. I had never cared too much which of the women on the circle I went home with. I don’t know how many women there had been over the years. I imagine it was somewhere between six or seven a year. Given the neighborhood and the location of my store, there was a simplicity and convenience that made each encounter seem almost logical, if not inevitable. I had slept with almost every prostitute who had come into my store. I did so by refusing to take their money when they came to the register to pay for their candy bar or can of soda. I would tell them that if they were free, they should come back alone just before I closed. When they did, I turned off all the lights, locked the door, and for a half hour tried to forget everything about myself. It was easy enough.

I stood up from my bench across from General Logan. I had settled on the woman walking closest to me. As soon as the women saw me standing up, they banded together. It was a small, protective act, just enough to make me sick of myself.

“Looking for something tonight?”

The voice that asked the question remained faceless in the dark.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just walking home.”

I turned around and walked away in the opposite direction. The last thing I wanted to do now was scare anyone. I walked quickly, and had the streets been entirely empty I would have run away from the circle as fast as I could.

11

W
hen I first came to this apartment, my uncle sat me down on the couch in the living room and proceeded to lecture me about what I could expect to find now that I was in America.

“Everything that is in this apartment,” he said, “belongs to you as much as it does to me. Outside of this apartment, though, you have nothing. Nothing is yours. Nothing belongs to you. Take nothing for granted. No one here will give you anything for free. There is no such thing as that in America. People will only give you something because they think they will get something in return.”

I remember there was absolutely no passion or conviction to his words. He seemed to be reading them off an invisible monitor lying just before his eyes, aimed toward the ground as they were. I don’t know if he saw in me a flicker of ambition or desire, but he need not have worried. I didn’t want anything from America. In those days I believed it was only a matter of weeks or months before I returned home to Ethiopia. I spent all my energy and free time planning for that. How was I supposed to live in America when I had never really left Ethiopia? I wasn’t, I decided. I wasn’t supposed to live here at all.

I nodded my head obediently as he spoke and pitied him for not understanding just how temporary all of this was.

For the first three weeks I was here in this apartment I didn’t speak to a single person besides my uncle, and even then our conversations were brief and strained. I rarely left the apartment, nor did I want to. Any connection, whether it was to a person, building, or time of day, would have been deceitful, and so I avoided making eye contact with people I didn’t know, and tried to deny myself even the simplest of pleasures. I refused to acknowledge the charm of a sunset or the pleasure of a summer afternoon. If possible, I would have denied myself the right to breathe another country’s air, or walk on its ground.

My uncle and I lived off the divide that separated our life in this apartment from everything that occurred outside of it. I ate his food. I slept on his couch. For two months this was all I did. At the end of the second month he came into the living room while I was getting ready to sleep, and said in that always whispering voice of his,
“Buka.”

I knew what he meant immediately: enough. And he was right, it had been enough. No one but he would have said it so gently, or granted me so much license.

I nodded my head in agreement. I was ashamed of myself and would have done anything he asked me to.

“Come with me to work tomorrow and I’ll try to find you a job,” he said.