How to Read the Air (7 page)

It took two days for Angela to learn that I had lost my job at the center. She always left for work just as I was waking up, and of course when she came home, I was supposed to be there waiting; our schedules had remained unchanged. We didn’t talk about my work during those two days, except to speculate once as to what might have happened to one of the clients we had worked with together.

“Do you remember the Kurdish family that came in just before I left?”

“What was their story?”

“Turkish—the father was arrested five times for no real reason. You may have said it was close to a dozen.”

“Seven. A dozen would have been too much. He was arrested seven times—beaten and tortured twice. He had to give bribes every week to keep from being arrested again. His family was going broke and hungry as a result.”

“Was any of that true?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt it. He was smart. He came in lying. I just helped him do it better. My guess is that right now he and his family are doing just fine.”

The next day she tried to reach me on my cell. Had I wanted to keep the truth about my job hidden from her, I would have answered my phone when she called. Instead I let it ring for the entire afternoon without even looking at it while I sat on the bench Angela and I had claimed. There I tried to recall just what exactly I had said to her the night before, and how much damage I may have caused as a result. Similar slips with the truth had occurred before, but there was often very little at stake.

At four p.m. she gave in and called the center directly. When Bill answered the phone, she asked him where I was.

“He must have thought I was an idiot,” she said later that evening. “Does he know we live together?”

“Yes. I told him as soon as I moved in.”

“That’s worse,” she said. “Honestly, I’d rather be an idiot.”

The fact that she had been embarrassed enraged her further; it made her victim to what she assumed would be other people’s pity. For the next fifteen minutes she puzzled over what had made me lie to her. “Are you trying to get out of this?” she asked. “If so you don’t have to lie. Just get up and leave.”

And then later: “Do you want me to be angry at you?” “Are you angry at me?” “Do you want to get back at me for something?” “Did I embarrass you?” “Do you not trust me?” “What else have you lied about?”

And for all of her questions I didn’t have a single response. Once found out, I had nothing to counter with in return. Angela yelled, and as her rage grew louder I found myself mentally backing out of the room, not all at once as I had previously done with Bill, but in slow, gradual stages so that it took some time before Angela noticed that all but the obligatory lights had gone out.

“Please tell me you’re listening to me, Jonas,” she said. “You haven’t said anything.”

“Of course I’m listening,” I told her. “That’s what I’ve been doing. I know you’re angry and you have every right to be.”

I learned after that to never try to placate her with what she knew to be simple, generic words of comfort.

 

 

 

 

As angry as Angela may have been that night, she was calm and rational once again a day later. There were other concerns on which she could focus her energy. I had lost my job, and after the following week, when my last paycheck arrived, I would no longer be able to help with the rent or the massive debt that Angela had assumed putting herself through college and law school. Even worse, I now figured into someone’s statistic—the twenty-five-to-thirty-five-year-old black male without a job; Angela had come too far in life to bear that for long. She never forgot the heights to which she had ascended, and at every moment she was looking back wondering how easy it would be to fall.

“We need to find you a job,” she said. To which I wholeheartedly agreed. Two weeks later Angela came home with what she said was great news.

“I had lunch today with Andrew, one of the senior partners at the firm. Somehow we started talking about you, and I told him you had just lost your job working at the same center where we met. He asked me what you wanted to do, and I said you were going to start applying soon to graduate school to get your Ph.D., but in the meantime you needed a job. He said he knew of one that had just opened up at his old school—a part-time teaching job that might not pay well but would be helpful in the future for the references alone. I think it would be great if you applied.”

Even had I wanted to, I couldn’t have said no to Angela. While she claimed to have forgiven me for lying to her, the damage remained. Her trust in me, and our relationship, was far from repaired, and I knew that a part of her was constantly on the lookout for any sign of deception. During the weeks I spent at home before I eventually began teaching at the academy, I felt obliged to send her messages several times a day to assure her that I was either at home or diligently searching for a new job. I told her frequently that I loved her, and couldn’t have been happier than where I was right now with her. She craved stability and security, and I wanted to give that to her. And while the desire to root myself may not have been as deeply ingrained in me as it was in Angela, I had grown tired by then of floundering and could have easily said, if asked, that I was also looking for something more enduring. Even beyond that I had begun to sense that my place in the world was rapidly shrinking, that this was not an age for idle drifters or starry-eyed dreamers who spoke wonderfully but did little. A time would come soon, I was convinced, when I would be politely asked to step off board the ship that was ferrying the rest of the population, and in particular my generation, forward. If I didn’t latch on to something soon, I’d find myself thrown overboard, completely adrift, bobbing out to sea with nothing, not even so much as a life vest of companionship to hold on to.

 

 

 

 

After three interviews and a background check that involved several phone calls to my former college professors, I was hired at the academy to teach a double course in literature and composition. I had studied English in college, and with the assistance of several friends had landed some temporary work copy-editing a couple of obscure academic journals, for which my work was criticized as being mediocre at best. It was enough, however, to qualify me to teach a course at the academy that the other teachers were reluctant to take on, or saw as beneath them, even though a name like mine, Jonas Woldemariam, often failed to inspire linguistic confidence in others.

“Where’s that accent of yours from?” the dean of the academy had asked me during our first interview, after I had said all of eight words to him: Hello. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

“Peoria,” I told him.

He hesitated for a second before moving on, and I could see him wondering if it was possible that there was more than one Peoria in this world, another situated perhaps thousands of miles away from the one he had heard of in the Midwest and therefore completely off his radar. He was clever, though, and worked his way around that.

“Did you spend a lot of time there?”

“I was born and raised there.”

“I see,” he said, by which he meant to say that he didn’t really see at all, and was even more confused than before. Afterward he led me on a personal tour of the academy’s four floors, the very last of which offered a view of Upper Manhattan that stretched to the lower end of Central Park, forty blocks south from where we stood. “It’s a beautiful building,” he said, and it was easy to hear the genuine awe in his voice when he spoke and the invitation for me to share in that awe with him. I had, however, paid scant attention to the details until then. I had been led up and down the stairs and through the hallways, but I had only been thinking of what could still possibly go wrong before the interview was finished. Regardless, I agreed wholeheartedly.

“It’s fantastic,” I said. “Really.”

When the dean called two days later to say that I had the job, I hung up the phone; I felt victorious. I had finally broken through the surface on which I had subsisted and was now going to be a part of real life.

From the beginning I knew that I wasn’t going to be hired on as a full-fledged teacher; there were enough full-time faculty members in the English department as it were, and none, even those entering their third decade at the academy, were looking to retire.

“It doesn’t mean we won’t have a full-time position for you in the future,” the dean told me. “In fact, I’m sure that if all goes well, we can all but guarantee that, but for now we can only hire you as half-time, or better yet, say three-quarter time since you’ll have plenty of homework to do.”

I spent the months before the school year started supported by Angela, who in her relief at seeing me gainfully employed had rather proudly declared that her boyfriend didn’t need to serve tables or find another temporary job. “Don’t worry,” she told me with what was supposed to pass as a sly wink. “I got you. And once you start working we can talk about what you owe me,” which of course could not be counted in simply monetary terms since what I owed her extended vastly beyond the remittances she gave me to cover the costs of dinners and grocery bills. I accompanied her more frequently to firm-sponsored events, and when asked what I did I was proud to respond, “I’m a teacher.” We began to think of ourselves as a black power couple in a city full of aspirants, the kind who would someday vacation for an entire month in the summer and whose children would attend elite private schools like the academy with the tuition paid full in advance.

A few days before my classes were scheduled to begin, Angela came home from work with a large elaborately wrapped bag that she set on the kitchen table as soon as she entered. She didn’t have to tell me that the package was a gift for me. It was obvious from the unrestrained smile on her face when she walked in. Angela was one of those people who took an almost excessive pleasure in seeing their gifts received, although in her case there was nothing vain or self-serving in it, and if anything, the act of gift-giving as performed by her was fraught with danger, which made the genuine looks of surprise and pleasure that much more meaningful when they came.

Before I had finished unwrapping it Angela told me what it was.

“It’s a satchel,” she said. “You’ll need a nice one when you’re a teacher. Or at least that’s what I hear anyway. Although if you hate it you can tell me. I still have a receipt. It’s black so it will go with everything.”

The bag was highly polished and elegantly stitched, most likely by hand, around all the edges, and although I made no mention of the price, and almost went out of my way to prove my ignorance of its worth, I knew from the first click of its silver clasps that it had cost multiple times more than what we could have ever hoped to have honestly afforded.

I began teaching at the start of the new year. It was early January and I was heading off once again to school for what felt like the first time. Angela sensed my anxiety, even though I never mentioned it. Without saying anything she woke up earlier than normal with me. We dressed for work standing side by side at the foot of the bed. Afterward we even took the same northbound train to Fourteenth Street, where Angela eventually transferred to the proper line. Her excuse for doing so was that she wanted to make sure I got to work safely.

“You never know,” she said. “You could get lost or kidnapped in this city.” On a crowded train we pressed ourselves together. I slid my hand under Angela’s jacket and held her stomach for support. When it was time for her to get off the train, she leaned back so I could kiss her good-bye, and in parting said, “Don’t be afraid of them, Jonas. They’re just kids.”

When I arrived at the academy and the first of my students entered the class, I understood what Angela had meant. By any standard I had been afraid for too long of anything that I thought might pose a physical or emotional risk, and Angela, in her own way, had always been aware of that. I hardly spoke in the company of strangers, and went out of my way to avoid expressing a contradictory opinion. Until Angela, I had kept my attachments to a minimum.

As soon as I began teaching at the academy I noticed that there was a distinct, almost palpable difference in the general haze through which until then I had conducted my life. Things, objects, people all suddenly appeared sharper, as if I had been wandering through the world with a pair of dirty, poorly cared-for glasses that blurred the lines and washed away distinctions. Angela, who had always struck me as pretty, with her large, wide eyes and equally large head, in which every feature was somehow perfectly exaggerated from her ears down to her lips, was now strikingly and even beyond that alarmingly beautiful. I couldn’t help staring often, and not only at her but at so much else throughout the city, from women on the street to men freely urinating in parks. There were vast swaths of both city and normal life that I had failed to notice, if only for the simple reason that none of it, as far as I had understood, concerned me and the quiet discreet life I had been living. I had always suspected that at some early point in my life, while still living with my parents and their daily battles, I had gone numb as a tactical strategy, perhaps at exactly that moment when we’re supposed to be waking up to the world and stepping into our own.

With my new job at the academy, I began to see myself as part of that active, breathing world which millions of others claimed membership to. When asked how my day was, I had, if I wanted, more than just a one-word response at hand. I had whole stories now that I often wanted to tell, even if I didn’t have the words for them yet.

V

When my mother finally entered the car, she noticed that today the seat belt only half worked. It hung tired and limp from the car ceiling, unable to tighten or relax, its position fixed, permanent, like a dead limb that can only be lifted and dropped and lifted again, vital and useless at the same time. When she slid into the passenger-side seat and buckled the belt into its metal clasp, it took on a second, unintended presence that was more than just physical. The belt, clasped around her stomach, became for her a confirmation of the simple fact that in some places, life did indeed matter, and deserved careful, deliberate protection. The lower half wrapped around her waist and today, the feeling was not that different from the sensation she felt when she wrapped one arm around her stomach and squeezed herself to the point of nausea.