The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (8 page)

From my living-room window I could see the lights in Judith’s house. There was at least one room on every floor that was fully lit. I decided there was something monstrous about a house with so many lights, something distinctly unjust.

After I’d been standing there for only a few minutes, the lights on the second floor began to flicker on and off. It was a signal from Naomi. We began to turn our lights off and on in an imaginary Morse code dialogue. I could picture her standing by the switch, eagerly flicking the lights until her head began to hurt. Finally, instead of continuing to respond, I just stood in the dark and tried not to think of her disappointment.

The next day Joseph and Kenneth came to the store and I told them about my dinner with Judith. I had mentioned her before—the house, Naomi, our conversations at the store—but only infrequently, and with no more passion than I discussed anything else that might have happened on that given day. When I told them about the dinner and brief kiss, the two of them looked up from their chessboard at each other, and not me.

“You see?” Joseph said. “You should listen to me more often.” He was wagging one of his chubby fingers at Kenneth, who was now leaning back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach.

“What can I say? You were right.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Jo-Jo said you were…what’s the word you used?”

“Enamored.”

“Yes. Enamored by this woman.”

When I looked over at Joseph he was struggling and failing to contain his grin.

“You have nothing to be embarrassed about, Stephanos. You’ve been in America for almost seventeen years. It’s about time you dated a white woman.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“He’s right,” Kenneth jumped in. “You spend too much time by yourself. You’re in this store all alone, and then you go home. It’s no way for a man to live.”

“What about the little girl’s father?” Joseph asked me.

“It was just dinner,” I said.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never asked her.”

“I imagine if I saw the three of you walking down the street, I would think you were it.”

There was a second of silence before Kenneth reached across the table and smacked Joseph on the arm.

“Sorry, Stephanos. You know what I meant.”

“Of course,” I told him.

Joseph won the chess game easily, as he always did. Whenever he plays against Kenneth or me, he does so absentmindedly, his fingers dancing over the board as if he were seeing it for the first time. When he moves a piece, he never focuses on the spot he’s moving it to. Instead, he turns his eyes back to his opponent, or even better, to someone else in the room, lending an air of inevitability to every move he makes. As a young man, he had been one of the better chess players in Kinshasa, known for his quiet, restrained demeanor even in the face of certain defeat. He had stories of all-night chess tournaments held in dingy cafés and bars, games that erupted into beatings, stabbings, and on occasion, shootings. “We had no jobs, we were done with school, no family, no money, so we played chess all day. It was what we did.” Clusters, and in some cases, surrogate families of young men formed around the game. Some were illiterate and had spent years fighting from the bush; others, like Joseph, were born into affluent families who had paid for French and English tutors before losing everything to Mobutu and his corrupt, bloated government. They had a religious devotion to the game, a respect for its handful of rules and almost infinite variations born, as Joseph said, out of a shared sense of gratitude for having at least one space where their decisions mattered. “Nobody,” he said once, “understands chess like an African.”

After the game was over, Joseph settled back into a quiet contemplation that involved deep breaths and long pauses between each sip of beer. Winning these games gave him nothing. Kenneth was rearranging the pieces on the board, trying to discover where he had gone wrong. If and when he figured it out, he would rock back in his chair and exclaim, “Now I see what you did, you tricky bastard. That will never work again with me.”

“You know,” Joseph said to me, “I dated a white woman once. She was from Boston. She had short curly red hair, so the teachers nicknamed her Rouge.”

“When?” I asked him.

“A long time ago.”

“In the Congo?”

“In Zaire. She was a Peace Corps volunteer.”

“For how long?”

“Almost two years.”

“You didn’t waste any time, did you?”

“What can I say? It was meant to be. We were teaching at the same school.”

“And then what?”

“She went back to Boston.”

“And you lost touch?”

“We never tried to keep it. Maybe I wrote her a letter once or twice, but nothing more than that. We had talked briefly about getting married and having little red Afro babies together, but we both knew better. She lives here now. I see her every once in a while. She’s come into the restaurant a few times for lunch.”

“What do you say to her?”

“Nothing.”

“Not even once?”

“I don’t think she recognizes me.”

“How could she not?” I asked him.

He finished his beer and patted his stomach.

“I was skinnier then,” he said. “You should have seen me. I was so beautiful. You wouldn’t have believed your eyes.”

5

O
n May 4 I wake up earlier than usual with my head still clouded from last night’s drinking. The sun has barely cracked through the day, and I can still hear Joseph’s voice singing in the bar. As I swing my legs onto the floor, I make a firm resolution to myself. To go on living halfheartedly is ridiculous, I think. Here I am; this is it. Starting today, I am going to press on valiantly. I am going to march through the hours and weeks and let no disappointment, regardless of how large, steer me from my course or bring me down. I am going to open my store early. I am going to catch the morning rush-hour commuters and make them mine.

By seven a.m. I’m fully dressed and walking out the door. Five minutes later, I’m standing in front of my store, pulling the keys out of my pocket. All around me people are walking, rushing, and for the first time since Judith and Naomi left the neighborhood, I am one of them. The morning is bright and mild; it is a picture-perfect May day with low humidity and surges of cool air that dry the sweat on my forehead as quickly as it forms. The day, I tell myself, is nothing to be afraid of. Life ticks on just as it always has. It was only by a trick of the imagination that I had come to believe I could step outside of it. Sunlight is tilting through the space between the leaves, lighting up the edges of the circle nearest my store. The sight is so perfect that I pause for a second, keys in hand, with the deliberate intention of admiring it.

I lift the lock from its latch, grab hold of the lowest rung on the grate, and with three quick, solid jerks hurl it over my head and send it crashing. That same sound is echoing from stores all across this city; it is we, the small storekeepers and newspaper vendors, who are drawing it back to life.

The grate crashes and locks into place, and as it does, a thin white envelope, slid into a corner of the door, flutters to the ground. My name is typed neatly on the front, with no postage or address. I pick it up and hold it against the sky. The sun catches it from the back. Through the envelope I can make out one clear line:
Dear Mr. Stephanos.

Dear Mr. Stephanos.
My knees give, just a bit, at the sight of the words. Something—call it hope, optimism—drops in my stomach and goes running.
Dear Mr. Stephanos.
A sign of official business. Never in my life have I done well with official business. Official business is prompt and efficient and demanding. I have a stack of official letters from vendors and utility companies and a credit card that all begin the same way:
Dear Mr. Stephanos.
In each of them there is a simple, unwavering demand for money, for which I’ve had no response except to close my eyes and wish desperately like a child that it would all go away. I have done the best I can under the circumstances. I write out checks for meager amounts: $10.34 here, $3.29 there. And when I can’t, I have learned not to pick up my phone or read my mail for a week or two at a time.

I bring the letter with me into the store. I don’t turn on the lights or lift the blinds. With the exception of the lifted grate, there is no sign that I am open for business. No one, I notice, even bothers to slow down or look in.

I lock the door behind me and place the letter on the counter. I turn it over once, and then twice. Courage, my father used to say, is being able to face the truth, regardless of what it may be, and remembering that, I tear the letter open along the side and take the kind of deep breath that’s supposed to brace you for bad news. I begin at the top of the page.

From the law firm of Elkin and Govind to Mr. Sepha Stephanos.

The name of the firm is familiar. I’ve seen it before on bus advertisements and on daytime television commercials. I can’t decide whether receiving a letter from a firm that advertises on plastic place cards to a captive audience makes the situation even worse. I never expected to be on the receiving end of a letter from a law firm that uses people lying in hospital beds as part of their advertising campaign, but life can be cruel and unpredictable, which is precisely what such firms are there to remind us of.

Beneath the letterhead is a date, May 3. The letter must have been left on my door sometime during the previous night while Joseph, Kenneth, and I were staring shyly at naked women.

Dear Mr. Stephanos:

This letter is to inform you that you have thirty days to vacate the property at 1150 P Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20008.

There are no treacherous demands or insinuating threats. The words become simple black characters against a page. Each character forms a word as discrete from the next as two strangers in a room. The letter is almost a page long, and mentions, in brief detail, my long history of overdue rent payments, going back ten years to a time when a few late months meant nothing in a neighborhood where each cleared check was cause enough for celebration and wonder. The tide has turned since then, and I have failed to keep pace. I could ask how this happened, but I know that I have no right to be surprised or angry. It’s May and I have yet to pay the rent for February, March, or April. I have let the store go; the aisles are once again burdened with sagging shelves, and somewhere in the back of the refrigerator cartons of milk are solidifying. It wasn’t supposed to have been like this. There was supposed to have been a string of good months. I had seen moving trucks with gilded mirrors and plush couches. There were construction workers who came to my store for lunch every day. I had a brand-new deli counter. I was supposed to have done so much by now. I was to have expanded my store into something bigger, grander, like a lunch counter, a grocery store, or a restaurant that people would take pride in. A place that I could truthfully write letters home about. I have learned to be a modest man, and never to exceed my means, but even poor men are allowed dreams from time to time. Who can blame me for this? No one can. I deserved it all.

I take a stand at the counter, on the opposite side of the register, and run my hand over the dusty white Formica top. Every story has an ending, and this letter, I realize, is going to be the shape of mine.

“This is no longer my store.”

When I need to convince myself of something, I say it out loud. This has been a habit of mine since childhood, something that I have always needed to do to align my thoughts with reality.

I shorten the phrase to make it more declarative before I say it again.

“This is not my store. This is not my counter, and that is not my register.”

What I want is to pick up each and every item in the store, run my hand along the walls and even the floor, over every piece of tile and packaged good, and repeat my negation of it.

I read the letter two, and then three times, and a few more times after that for good measure. It’s printed out on a nice piece of letterhead that has type in two different colors. I call Kenneth at work to tell him what’s happening. He answers on the first ring. I read him the opening sentence, and then ramble on about inflated rents, slow months, and lines of credit still owed. I try to sound indignant, or at least angry, but I know that instead my voice comes across as lost, perhaps even childish. Kenneth is silent for a long time before he says anything.

“Isn’t this what you wanted?” he finally asks.

“I never said that.”

“No. That’s true. You never said, ‘I want to open and close my store whenever I want, lose all my customers, and then be forced out of business.’ But that doesn’t mean you didn’t want it.”

“I didn’t want it.”

“Then why haven’t you done something, Stephanos?”

His voice is full of pity when he says that last line. I know if he had thought saying it would have done any good, he would have encouraged me with all the pep and enthusiasm of a high school football coach. As it is, his disappointment is greater than mine.

“I will. You’re right. I’ll figure something out.”

“I don’t have that kind of money, but—”

I know what he wants to say next, but I won’t let him.

“Joseph Kony,” I say.

“What?”

“Joseph Kony.”

A few seconds of silence passes before he says anything else. In that time, I twirl the phone cord around my index finger so tightly I can see the blood swelling at the tip.

“Uganda. The Lord’s Resistance Army. The L.R.A.,” he says.

“Easy enough,” I tell him.

“He likes to mutilate children. Chops off their ears and lips and nose. He says he can speak to angels.”

“Very precise.”