A Model World And Other Stories (7 page)

Tonight Roksana calls after I play a song for her. She says thank you, very politely, and we don’t chat. I picture her sitting at the table with the radio and the telephone, in her men’s underwear, eating a plate of boiled meat or a five-ton slab of some Iranian dessert, listening to the sound of my voice speaking in a language she doesn’t know. When I picture this, I am filled with love and hopelessness. Paris seemed like a good idea when I was hopeless in New York, the way New York did when I was hopeless in Dallas, but it hasn’t worked even the slightest charm, and Roksana’s tremendous heart slumbers on. I do not even have her thanks. “You should have charged me,” she has said, twice. “I would have paid.”

After she hangs up, I put on “Sister Ray,” because it’s seventeen minutes long, and I go to stand in the street outside the studio and smoke three cigarettes end to end. No one else is in the little studio at this hour, and the thought of the stylus drawing nearer and nearer to the emptiness after the last groove of the song, without me there to make the segue, thrills me and keeps me from thinking about everything else. And then when I am thrilled enough, I drop the third cigarette and rush back into the studio, with the stumbling, happy urgency of someone who has heard the milk on the stove begin to boil over. I play this game pretty often. Sometimes I make it, sometimes there’s a terrible pause.

At midnight I shake hands with Jean-Marc, le Jazz-Maniac, who’s on his way in for his shift. Then I’m out and I echo along the street to the Metro and clatter down onto the empty platform. At the foot of an advertisement for a new American film, someone has scrawled a tangle of Farsi, a long, descending statement followed by three tiny exclamation points, and it looks to me like the notation for a difficult passage of music, a decrescendo. I catch the next-to-last train home and ride alone in the fluorescence the whole slow way. I’ve read all the advertisements, all the safety warnings and every damn word of French between the Europe and the Père-Lachaise stations a hundred times, and now reading them again makes me jumpy, impatient. I’m in a hurry because it’s late and we still have to pack for our trip to Brittany tomorrow. And when I get home, Roksana’s stretched out on the sofa with her eyes wide open and the two suitcases are lying empty on the living-room floor.

“Roksana,” I say, “I saw some Persian graffiti in the Metro again tonight.”

“I didn’t write it,” she says.

“Come on, let’s talk. Tell me some more about Iran.”

We’ve finished packing and we’re on the sofa, and I draw her big head down onto my lap; I hold it there. Her hair is always cool to the touch. The light in the living room, dim and pink through the heavy shade on the only lamp, tends to put us to sleep anyway, and now it’s 3 A.M.; Roksana is going under, eyelids fluttering. Every so often she stirs and struggles to free her hair from my twining fingers. She stiffens her neck, and against my thigh I feel the hardness of the muscles of her back. Now that I’ve mentioned Iran, she springs up and goes to perch on the other end of the sofa, black eyes, no nonsense. My lap feels cold.

“What about Iran?” she says. “Let’s not.”

“No, please.” I don’t really want to talk about Iran, either. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times before, but what else is there? About the things someone would write on an advertisement in the Metro. “I don’t know. The shah, the ayatollah.”

“Tell me what you think,” she says, barely, and yawns, and there again are the three gold teeth I bought for her. I had heard that toothache can cause profound, moral sadness.

“As far as I could see, um, the shah was an asshole and they threw him out, but he died anyway. And then the ayatollah came in, and he’s an asshole, too. And a bunch of sweaty guys were running around throwing Coke cans and setting American flags on fire.”

“That’s it,” she says. She stands up, I watch her black knit dress gather around her hips, then fall, one instant of yellow boxers. “I’m going to bed. Goodnight.”

Many things fill the distance between me and Roksana, and one of them is the nation of Iran. If you look at a map, I am the Caspian Sea, and she is the Persian Gulf. Once upon a time, I suppose, the whole place was underwater.

Roksana hoists our suitcases and we follow Hervé Heugel down onto the platform at Le Pouliguen, where we stand waiting for his mother or his father, I’m not sure which, to take us to the Heugel manor, or
chateau
, as Hervé calls it. I’ve known Hervé for about a month. He lives in our neighborhood in Paris and takes his morning coffee around the corner from our apartment, at the Voltaire, where one day he spotted my accent and my Velvet Underground T-shirt and, after I gave him the money for a croissant, became my friend. Though he looks kind of intellectual and severe—big forehead, pointy chin, rimless glasses, and a crew cut—it turns out that he has no interests other than the usual nonintellectual ones. He loves to laugh and to swear in English—the only English he knows. He and Roksana don’t like each other very much, although neither would ever say so. They can barely speak to each other, anyway. Hervé is arrogant, callous, and I often feel myself getting on his nerves, but he knows his garage bands of the late sixties, and he knows the city, and sometimes he drives me around Paris on the back of his motor scooter, his thin scarf flapping in my face. I think that if I met someone like Hervé in America, I wouldn’t make friends with him, but there are no people like him in America. And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn’t have to understand what you feel, and I don’t expect it. It’s enough if he understands what you just said.

We can smell the sea now, and I look around eagerly at the tiny cars, the embracing families, the ancient candy machine rusting next to the men’s room, and at the low brown houses and scrub fields that surround the train station.

“She is there,” says Hervé. He pushes his stern little glasses up his nose, drops his Adidas duffel. When his mother reaches us, he takes her in his arms, gets it on both cheeks, and then presents us. His mother is short, a bit wrinkled but fine-featured, with motionless hair.

“Ah, the little Americans,” she says uncertainly. “Brine.”

“Brian. Brian Blumenthal,” says Hervé, fairly well. “And—Roksana—Khairzada.”

“Brine,” says Madame Heugel, and she takes my hand, a complex expression on her face—a smile-frown, or a polite sneer. Or just a face that is uncomfortable with our names, and with our presence, and with my wife, and with her own son. whom, I know, she considers lazy, sly, and overly fond of Americans, particularly of American girls.

She asks her son if we speak French; I answer for both of us. “I do, my wife regrets that she doesn’t.” Then Hervé takes her arm and off they go, speaking French, and we follow.

“She hates me,” Roksana says quietly.

“No, she doesn’t. Why do you say that?”

“It’s all right, I don’t care. She can hate me.”

I try to pull her to me, and I’m about to say again those three helpless words when she stops short.

“Look,” she says.

Behind the scratched display window of the candy machine is a brand of chocolate bar with an English name: Big Nuts. Roksana laughs. I buy one and put it in my pocket, and when we reach the Heugel Renault, I am still smiling.

“Oh, what beautiful teeth,” says Madame Heugel.

“Yes, they’re like that—American teeth,” says Hervé.

We eat outside, at a long table, and lunch is a mountain of steamed shrimp, a stacked cord of fresh asparagus, cider, and bread. Hervé’s father, who looks like Hervé—thin with a large head and a sharp nose—tells us in French about his trip to New York City in 1968. I am delighted by his account of a misadventure in “les Bronx,” and everything goes well until I notice that my plate is the only one on which mounts a pile of tails, shells, rosy filaments, and shrimp heads; Hervé and his parents are eating the entire shrimp, unpeeled. Roksana will not eat shrimp.

“No one told me what kind of a neighborhood I would have to walk through to get to the Cloisters,” says Monsieur Heugel, struggling with the word. He has shot five small fowl that morning and seems to be in fine spirits; I saw the brown and iridescent-green pile of birds on the kitchen table. “Harlem! Think of that! Full of blacks! Did I care?”

“Yes,” Hervé says.

“No, I did not. I walked right through. On my way home I had an appetite, I stopped at a little coffee shop, I bought a sandwich, I sat right down on the curb, in Harlem, and ate it. No one bothered me.” He smiles at his wife, who probably hears this story every time the Heugels feed an American, and she smiles and reaches to move his sleeve out of the butter dish. “I have nothing against blacks; you see.”

“Since when?” Hervé turns to me. “He’s completely prejudiced against blacks. Blacks and Arabs.”

Right away he puts an embarrassed hand to his mouth, and we all turn to look at Roksana—myself included, which makes me ashamed—who has no idea of what’s been said and continues calmly to eat her asparagus and bread, eyes to her plate. While Monsieur Heugel protests that he has known several Arabs who were very worthwhile fellows and, it must be said, skilled businessmen, and Hervésnorts and puts away fistfuls of shrimp, I push back my chair.

Our table is spread in the grassy
clos
between two of the estate’s several houses. On my right is an ivy-covered stone building with a turret, five chimneys, and fabulous eaves—the house of Hervé’s family; on my left, across the lawn, is one of the larger outbuildings, a brown barn that has been converted into a guesthouse. All around our table are bees and butterflies and giant oaks, the air smells lightly of manure and salt, and across from me, in the distance behind Monsieur Heugel, is the bay, filled with sails. I watch Roksana chew, closed, dark, mute, immovable, and I think: I am a fool.

“Oh, the little American,” says Madame Heugel, pointing delicately with her fork at my plate. “He will not eat the heads!”

They laugh, and Roksana looks up.

“In America,” I say, “it’s unlucky to eat them.” I fold another buttery stalk of asparagus into my mouth. The Heugels shoot another round of glances at my staring wife.

“Monsieur Heugel,” I say, “how many centuries has this manor been in your family?”

“Hervé’s grandfather purchased the manor in 1948,” says Madame Heugel.

Everyone laughs much louder this time. Roksana looks up again, her face blank, her jaw working, and for one moment, and for the first time, I feel like striking her.

I excuse myself, leaving Roksana to sit at their table, to suck up all their joy and conversation like a black hole. I hate all of them.

Upstairs, I sit in the tub and hold the hand nozzle over my head for a few minutes, showering off the train ride and the strange conversation, which, after all, I may have misunderstood. Then I go back into the bedroom the Heugels have given us, which smells of cedar. With a towel on my head I step over to one of the lozenge-shaped windows and look outside, onto the yard, where the table is still covered with the wreckage of lunch and where Hervé and his father drink Calvados from little glasses. Roksana and Hervé’s mother have disappeared, perhaps into the house, and I have this brief, stupid, happy fantasy of the two of them doing the dishes together, working in smooth and wordless concert.

When I take from my suitcase the new dress shirt, white with coral pinstripes, that I bought specially at an outlet store in the rue du Commerce, because Hervé had promised to take us to a Breton club where the women would go wild over my accent, the shirt is wrinkled and my shaving cream has exploded all across the collar. I sit down on the bed, looking for a long time at the pale blue smear of foam and trying to remember the word for clothes iron.

The stairs creak. Roksana’s face is in the doorway for half a second, and I think she’s coming into the bedroom. I toss aside the spoiled shirt, but she turns and I hear her start to creak back downstairs. I shut my eyes. “Roksana.”

Plates in the kitchen, laughter outside.

“I need to be alone.”

“Please come here.”

When I open my eyes she’s in the doorway again. This time I see the anger on her face, and before the words come out of her mouth I know, with a rush of bent happiness, that we’re going to have a fight, after a year and a half of wedlock as empty and quiet as a dark theater.

“I want to leave,” she says, coming into the room and slamming the door behind her. “I’m not welcome here. You stay. They like you.”

“You’re as welcome as you choose to be.”

“No. Bullshit. They were laughing. They were laughing at me. I could tell. You were laughing at me, you bastard.”

“You bitch.”

I’m still sitting down, and Roksana steps so close to me now that the tips of her pointed black shoes come down, hard, on my toes. She throws a shadow across me.

“Please, don’t,” I say.

“I don’t know why I’m here.”

“You’re here because it’s Bastille Day. You’re here to have fun. Ouch! Can’t you ever have fun?”

Roksana looks down upon me, her eyes perfectly dry and black, and says that she hates fun more than anything else in this world, and I see that I misunderstood her when she said she didn’t know why she was here, because I thought that by “here” she just meant in Brittany.

“You sound like Khomeini,” I say, trying to slide my pinched feet out from under her shoes, and reeling somehow offended, as though I were responsible for all of us, and for the fireworks and feast days and surfeits of the entire fun hemisphere. I manage to free my feet, but now she grabs me by the ears and pulls, and it hurts.

“What do you know about Khomeini? What do you know about me? I am not fun. Do you think to run away from Iran was fun? From my mother? From the bodies of my family?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, still angry. “Fine. Go. Go back. All I have to do is say the word to Mr. Immigration and you can go right back to the land of seriousness.”

“You won’t.”

“I might,” I say, and think, well, I could. But I can’t stand the frightened, stubborn way she has narrowed her eyes or the way the room and the air between us seems filled with the cheesy smell of blackmail. I look down and my gaze falls upon the blue on my shirt collar. “You said I should have charged you. I’m charging you now.”