The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (6 page)

“You could learn something from him, Jo-Jo. That Kabila’s a good man. A role model for all you Congolese.”

“You said the same about Mobutu,” Joseph says.

“That was just a joke. It was only because I liked his last name. Sese Seko. Sese Seko. I could say it over and over. But Kabila’s a man of his word. He’s the future of Africa’s leaders.”

“He will be dead within a year. Or he will never leave. It is always one or the other.”

Kenneth leans his elbows back against the counter and stretches out his long lanky legs. “Help me out here, Stephanos.”

“Dead within two years,” I tell him.

At seven-thirty I close the doors to the store. Neither Joseph nor Kenneth asks me why I’m closing early, or whether it’s been a good day, since no one has entered since they arrived. I don’t add up the register because I’ve already done the math in my head. I know just how little I’ve earned. I pull a handful of bills out of the drawer and stuff them into my pocket, as if they were inconsequential.

Kenneth throws his arm around my shoulder and says, “Come on, Stephanos. It’s time to leave.” He squeezes my shoulder once, firmly, for encouragement.

Without asking or worrying about where we’re going, I get into Kenneth’s car with the two of them and we pull away from the store. We drive past my house, and what’s left of Judith’s, without pausing at the stop sign on the corner. The idea is to leave this neighborhood and store as quickly as possible, to rush headlong into the sun, which is just now setting. The entire flat skyline of the city is tinged with a pinkish hue that hardly seems real. We roll our windows down. In the backseat, Joseph puts his feet up and closes his eyes as the wind whips over his face. We all breathe in deeply. Kenneth cuts down one narrow side street after another to avoid traffic; the trees, flowers, and bushes are all in bloom. There is something unsettling about spring in D.C., a cautionary tale of overindulgence and inflated expectations that seems embedded in the grass and in the trees. I thought I had long since learned to keep those expectations in check, but it happens anyway, doesn’t it? We forget who we are and where we came from, and in doing so, believe we are entitled to much more than we deserve.

In just a few minutes, we pull up in front of the Royal Castle, which from the outside still looks like the Chinese restaurant it had once been. The red awning and generic Asian typeface cast against a gold background stayed even after the menu had been reduced to buffalo wings, french fries, and hamburgers, and the large circular booths with the lazy Susans were replaced with stages, poles, and a row of chairs that remind me of a high school auditorium.

Instead of arguing or protesting, Joseph and I follow Kenneth in. We take a table in the back of the club, which is entirely empty except for us. Our isolation feels ridiculous. There’s no one else to share our shame with, and when a topless waitress comes over to take our order, none of us can muster enough courage to look her in the face.

“Why are we here, Ken?”

“Because, Stephanos. This is what people do at the end of a hard day.”

As if to prove his point, he undoes the top button on his shirt and loosens his tie a few inches. I’ve never met his boss, but I can hear his voice ringing in the back of Kenneth’s head. “Still fighting the good fight, Kenneth?” it says.

We order three scotches, drink them quickly, and order three more. Women come and go off the stage every three and a half minutes, dancing halfheartedly to the ’80s pop songs I used to love listening to in my store. Prince. INXS. The Cure. When they finish dancing they saunter over to our table and introduce themselves. They all have names from Greek and Roman mythology: Venus, Apollonia, Aphrodite—names that promise an unattainable bit of love and heaven. Before they can offer us anything, we hand them two singles each, and Kenneth tells them all that they’re beautiful.

“Beautiful,” he says, with his lips pursed, eyes turned to the ceiling in a feigned state of ecstatic reverie.

The drinks are ten dollars, and each one lasts for exactly three songs, which is equal to three dancers, which means we’re spending about a dollar a minute, and that in sixty-eight minutes, I will have spent all the money I earned that day.

I take my last eight dollars out of my pocket and lay it on the table.

“Once that’s done, so am I.”

Joseph slides the bills back toward me. “Keep it,” he says. “The rest of the evening is on me.”

Kenneth pours back his scotch and slides the glass across the table so it almost falls on my lap. “No,” he says. “The rest of the evening is on me.”

They go back and forth for several minutes, each one insisting repeatedly that the “evening is on me” even though it’s been clear from the start that Kenneth will be the one to pay. Still, what matters just as much as the outcome is how they get there. With the decision settled, Kenneth hands control over the rest of the night to Joseph, who places one hand on each of our backs and says, “Gentlemen, it is time for us to go.”

There is nothing left of downtown D.C. by the time we walk outside. The city has emptied itself of its bureaucrats, politicians, lawyers, secretaries, diplomats, lobbyists, and bankers. The shutters are pulled down in front of all the storefronts, and graffiti has been scrawled all over them.
Beso. Crazy Nigga. East Capitol Crew.
The only people we pass on the street are all well dressed and well heeled, on their way home to the suburbs of Virginia or to one of the handful of luxurious restaurants that stand as clearly isolated from one another as a pair of trees in an open plain. The Capitol’s white dome seems to hover in front of us, and if I turn just a little to the right, I can see the red eye sitting at the peak of the Washington Monument. There is no mystery left in any of those buildings for us, and at times I wonder how there ever could have been.

I stop in the middle of the road as we cross the street toward the car and look up and hard while Kenneth and Joseph walk on. I’m waiting to see if I can recall that emotion now—a silent, almost fearful awe that came when I first saw each building from a passing van, and that continued to come involuntarily for years afterward. My mother and father both claimed to have felt something similar every time they saw the emperor in Ethiopia—power embodied, as it were, in a single man.

I wink at the monument, salute the Capitol, and then run to catch up with Joseph and Kenneth, who are both already sitting in the car waiting for me.

“What were you doing back there, Stephanos?” Joseph asks me as I slide into the backseat.

I shrug. I don’t know what to tell him, but he gives me a grin that says he already knows. After we finished our shifts at the Capitol Hotel, the three of us often spent the rest of our evenings perched on one of the benches across from the White House, or on the tree-lined paths leading up to the Lincoln Memorial.

“Look at those buildings,” Joseph said once. “I would have…” He stopped there, stuck in midsentence. It was one of the few times in all the years I have known him that he has ever been speechless. We rarely talked about the buildings explicitly, but I know that Joseph and Kenneth both spent hours standing in front of Lincoln’s massive, imposing figure, seated on his throne with an indifferent gaze cast toward the city. During his first few months in America, Joseph had memorized the Gettysburg Address off the memorial’s walls, and spent several nights watching the sun rise from its steps. It’s been years since either of them has gone near those buildings, and how could you blame them? Reality has settled in, and they’re both still waiting to recover.

We decide to end our evening at a small, dark, crowded bar on the northwest edge of the city. The crowd tonight is mixed. A half-dozen Nigerians, all friends with the owner, are pressed up against the bar, loudly ordering drinks and shots for one another. At the other end is an old white man with a beard drinking slowly by himself. Scattered throughout the booths and tables in the back are a couple dozen young white kids—the first to live in this neighborhood in thirty years. Kenneth and I slide into a booth and begin to drink. Joseph goes to the back of the bar and puts a dollar into the jukebox. We’ve been waiting for this moment to one degree or another since our first drink of the night. It takes about fifteen more minutes before the song begins, and with the first chord, we raise our glasses and toast. When the refrain starts, the three of us lean forward and sing along:

But you won’t fool the children of the revolution.

No you won’t fool the children of the revolution.

Over and over, until the song ends, by which point we’ve all finished our drinks and are ready for another.

The first time we heard that song we were sitting two booths farther back. We still worked at the Capitol Hotel; Joseph and Kenneth were sharing an apartment just a few blocks away from the bar. The song played, and Joseph stood up drunkenly and declared, “That is us. We are the children of the revolution.” His accent was heavier then, weighted with tinges of French that struggled under a formal locution to come through. It took him several tries before we understood what he was saying, each attempt punctuated by an emphatic thrust toward the air holding the music, and in holding the music, holding Joseph as well. When we finally did understand him, Kenneth and I stood up, and together the three of us nodded our heads to the words we barely understood, the refrain repeating its unintended sympathies over and over.

Now, when the song is over, it’s hard not to laugh at our misplaced enthusiasm. We had been in America for only a couple of years when we first heard it, and we did believe that we were children of a revolution, and not only because we were willing to be grand. We all had stories of families we missed and would never see again. We spoke in our broken English of Africa’s tyrannies, which had yet to grow tedious. And we had our own stories of death and violence to match.

The song plays two more times over the course of the next two hours, and each time, like children being coaxed into a conversation, we sing along.

4

T
he first time Judith invited me over for dinner, she had Naomi slip a note into my mailbox.

Dear Mr. Stephanos,

My mother and I would like to invite you to our house for dinner. On November 28. We would be very happy if you could come.

Judith and Naomi

The letter arrived the day before Thanksgiving and carried me through the holiday. It was written in Naomi’s delicate, tiny handwriting on a canary yellow piece of stationery that had Judith’s name at the bottom. It was folded into a square small enough to fit into the center of my palm. Three days after getting the letter, I closed my store one hour early for the first time in years. It was an exceptionally cold night, and by seven-thirty an almost impenetrable hush had slipped over the neighborhood. Some people had rushed home from work, while others never left their house to begin with. The few people who came into the store that evening did so just to escape the cold. They lingered for ten or fifteen minutes over whatever it was they had supposedly come in to buy, and then left abruptly, feigning disappointment or frustration as they shook their heads, blew into their hands, and tucked their chins into their collars.

I went home early and changed into a neatly pressed button-down white shirt and a pair of slightly worn gray wool slacks Kenneth had handed down to me. The cuff links, a holdover from my father’s days in the Ethiopian government, had the old Ethiopian flag with the Lion of Judah and his crooked crown on it. They were the only things of my father I had left. He used to keep them in a small gray jewelry box with the lid open on top of the dresser in his bedroom, although I can’t remember ever having seen him wear them. What I can remember is him holding them out to me and saying with a slight, sarcastic lilt to his voice, “Someday all this will be yours.” I don’t think he ever actually intended for them to become heirlooms. They were just cheap cuff links from an old, decaying regime, but you hold on to what you can and hope the meaning comes later.

Before leaving the house I stood in front of my bathroom mirror and practiced my introduction. I brushed forward the edges of my thinning hair and patted down the sides of my small Afro. My reflection stared back disapprovingly. I had aged, but there was nothing distinguished about me. The laugh lines around my mouth had burrowed in, and there was more of my forehead than I cared to show. I smiled and tried to find a hint of a younger and better version of myself, but there was no doing. He was gone.

I stepped back from the mirror and practiced my introduction. I wanted to be ready for the moment Judith opened the door and found me standing on her steps. I wanted to strike the right chord, leave no room for error.

“Hello. Great to see you.”

“I’m honored to be here. Thank you for having me.”

“It’s a pleasure to be here. It was so kind of you to invite me.”

I tried to take my time walking to Judith’s house, but all I had were two flights of stairs, two porches, and a few feet of sidewalk to separate us. I took the steps slowly. When I reached my front door I still had nine minutes to pass, so I tied and untied my shoelaces in front of my house. I looked up at the sky to see if there were any stars that I could count, or a moon to describe, but there was nothing, only clouds that still retained a muted shade of pink left from the sun.

When I finally rang the doorbell, Naomi answered. Her mother had tried to braid her hair into a row of plaits, but it had come out as a half-dozen uneven, lopsided braids that erupted into a tuft in the back. It gave Naomi an oddly menacing look that somehow seemed intended. She stood in the doorway looking like a lunatic and stared at me as if I were the man responsible for all of the world’s frustrated desires, a fool who accidentally gave bad directions to people on their honeymoons, contemptuous but good-natured.