In the Light of What We Know (23 page)

I was of two minds about attending, not only because I would be jet-lagged by midevening, after flying into New York forty-eight hours before, but also because I wasn’t particularly keen to meet the Afghan businessman, not for some lofty ethical reason but because inevitably I would be pumped for information about the extended family. Through my parents, I was sufficiently up to speed with its news to give a passable account, but I rather feared the Afghan might follow me about for the evening, hungry for news about my grandfather’s businesses, even if I told him, as I had in the past, that I knew nothing.

For all my misgivings, I went to the reception, carried there by a sense of obligation to my grandfather, who had sent word, which I received that morning, that if any member of the family happened to be in New York at the time, he would appreciate a show of face at the reception. I owe the man a good deal but I also love him.

When Zafar and I arrived at the exhibition hall, it was dusk and the reception was already under way. I needed to go to the restroom and left Zafar to fend for himself. Some of the eccentricities that attach to the reputation of mathematicians did indeed attach to him, but those eccentricities never seemed to cripple him socially. They were actually apparent mainly in private one-on-one conversations when, for instance, in the course of discussing something he might suddenly stop in midsentence, disappear into himself for a few moments, before returning to pick up whatever it was he was saying. Sometimes, he simply walked off. He might, for instance, be so absorbed in something he was reading that, as I recall once, when coming to the college library to fetch him for lunch, I had to shake him quite violently before he stirred. In fact, I’d had to do so just that evening, before the reception, when I collected him from his trading desk, prizing him from an array of computer screens.

Still, I knew he was quite unafraid to approach people and make his own introductions. I have seen him stride up to people and say: Hello, my name is Zafar. What’s yours? He would tilt his head and smile, and that was enough to strike up a conversation. But I returned to find Zafar standing alone with a glass of champagne in hand, looking at a map of South Asia.

A few paces from him stood a woman facing the adjoining exhibit. She looked vaguely familiar. Her face was powdery white and her eyelashes suggested mascara; she wore a black dress cut just above the knee, and her wavy hair was bunched up high at the back of her head. The breast of her jacket promised a curve, though later I would grasp the falsity of that soft curve when it gave up a padded bra. At the South Asia Society, standing by a hanging rug that evening, this figure maintained itself in a stillness that seemed to continue forever. She looked beautiful to me, and I was struck by a feeling of physical weakness, as I have always been on those occasions when feminine beauty aroused me.

I recognized the woman. Emily! I exclaimed, as I drew near. She smiled to see me and she then looked lovelier than I ever remembered her, lovelier than James’s skinny older sister, lovelier than the reserved eighteen-year-old Oxford undergraduate I’d known, with little to say for herself; she had blossomed. Of course, I know that Zafar says he didn’t find her quite so beautiful, but I don’t buy it. I just don’t.

I made introductions, and if there had been at that moment any indication of recognition on Zafar’s part, or, for that matter, any sign of mutual attraction, then I failed to notice it. Perhaps I was distracted in my own way.

We exchanged information, where we were, what we were doing. I explained that I’d just joined the firm where Zafar was already a trader in the New York office. I was in New York for induction before going back to London. I explained to Zafar my connection with Emily through her brother and also through a mutual family friend. As I think of it now, I remember that Zafar said only a few words throughout this. Emily explained—but only after I’d pressed her on her connection with the event—that she’d come to the reception as a guest of Aisha Marwan, our mutual friend, the Pakistani socialite who was apparently in New York for a wedding. Aisha hadn’t arrived yet (and would never show).

It was hard going getting anything out of Emily. Zafar has described her personality as secretive, and I now wonder if by this he meant something more than that she withheld information, if perhaps he was identifying some underlying character trait that caused her to withhold her
presence
before people. Even if I had not seen her in two or three years, I knew the reputation she had acquired, which was of a hugely ambitious person, dedicated to advancement. But it seems to me likely that such deprecatory remarks as have circulated from time to time might owe more than a little to the envy of other women. Nevertheless, the evident ambition suggests one line of analysis, which is that Emily saw her relationships and exchanges with people purely through the prism of function, so that unstructured social banter was foreign to her mental makeup.

Emily explained—not without some coaxing—that after Oxford she’d spent two years at Harvard studying public policy, which she was just finishing, and was thinking about going back to England to train as a lawyer, although at some point she wanted to work in international development.

After hearing out her answers, Zafar leaned forward.

You don’t seem sure about it? he asked her.

What was the
it
? I thought.

I’m trying to decide.

The three of us hung loosely together, drifting back and forth. I introduced my friends to Hamid Karzai, now president of Afghanistan but at that time a rather shady figure involved in the oil business. We chatted pleasantries, Karzai expressing an embarrassingly effusive friendliness toward me, and he asked me to pass on his good wishes to my grandfathers, “both of them,” he said with baffling emphasis.

Inevitably, I reluctantly encountered the Afghan businessman, but when he quite obviously took a shine to Emily I found my moment to slip away. Zafar had already wandered off.

I toured the exhibits, taking in the rugs and other items. From time to time, I looked over at Emily, who now had a little gathering around her, which included Karzai as well as a small, wiry figure whom I did not recognize but who seemed to be holding forth to the circle around him. This man, I would learn much later, was Mohammed Jalaluddin.

When I saw Zafar, I stopped to regard him and could not resist a grin; he was going from one vinyl wall panel to the next, reading the explanatory text without stopping to look at the rugs.

I think I was still grinning when I looked over at Emily—perhaps I had in mind to share the observation with a nod—but as I watched her, I saw that she was stealing glances at Zafar.

*   *   *

The following day, when Zafar thanked me for taking him along to the reception, I brought up a rather odd moment that I had wanted to ask him about. At a certain point in the evening, I had been standing with Karzai, Zafar, Emily, and the wiry fellow, along with two or three other men who said nothing and grinned inanely from time to time, after the fashion of hangers-on. Karzai praised my grandfather before the assembled group for some or other business decision. I thanked him for his kind words and was about to ease away when Karzai shot a forefinger into the air.

You must have my tickets. You’re a cultured man, he said to me. I have two tickets for the New York City Ballet. You must have them.

Before I could respond, he had plucked them from his breast pocket and pushed them into my hands. Two seats. I hated ballet.

I’m sorry, I said, but I’m afraid I’m already fixed for that evening.

Then you must pass them on.

I handed them to Zafar.

I couldn’t possibly accept. These are excellent seats, said Zafar, looking at the tickets.

But you must, said Karzai, smiling not at Zafar but at me. It is my gift.

I wished Zafar would just thank him so we could all move on.

All right, said Zafar, coming to my rescue. However, addressing Hamid Karzai, he added: But you have to tell me what your favorite charity is.

Hamid Karzai looked a little confused.

What is your favorite charity, Mr. Karzai?

I can’t have been the only one wondering if Karzai might not have a favorite charity. Emily and I exchanged looks.

UNICEF, he said finally.

Excellent, said Zafar, pulling out his checkbook.

Zafar tapped my shoulder, I turned, and against my back he wrote out a check.

They’re expensive tickets, Mr. Karzai, said Zafar, but then UNICEF is such a deserving cause, he added.

As he tore off the check, I saw that it was made out in the amount of three hundred dollars.

Would you like to send this to UNICEF, or shall I?

Why don’t
you
? replied Karzai, whose smile was visibly forced.

As I say, the following day I asked Zafar why he’d written a check to UNICEF.

The man said it was his favorite charity, replied Zafar.

You know what I mean.

A man like Karzai doesn’t give gifts, he exchanges favors.

You think ballet tickets put you in debt to him?

No, but it makes it just that much easier to call
you
and inquire how I enjoyed the ballet before asking you a favor. They trade on the stuff; this is how these people work.

Afghans?

Elites. Why should you, of all people, need tickets for the ballet? Your grandfather could buy the whole First Ring faster than a Russian could say Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Maybe he was just being friendly, I said.

You don’t believe that.

Zafar, I thought, was overanalyzing.

What in the world could he want from you? I asked.

I was introduced to him as
your
friend.

Which means I might have owed him something, not you.

Zafar had paid off Karzai, made a show of giving UNICEF, Karzai’s favorite charity, an amount equal to the face value of the tickets, in order that I wouldn’t be beholden to the man.

Wait a minute, I said. Does that mean I owe
you
a debt?

I suppose it does, replied Zafar. I might even call on it one day, he added with a grin.

I laughed.

What are you going to do with the tickets?

I’ve never been to a ballet.

You’ve got two tickets.

I considered the possibility, even without any good basis, that he might invite Emily. But Zafar said nothing.

I’m surprised Emily’s going to become a lawyer, I said. I never pegged her for that.

But she didn’t say she was becoming a lawyer.

She did. She said she’s going to law school.

She said she’s going to train as a lawyer.

Why go to law school if not to become a lawyer?

I don’t know. But who says she’s going to train as a lawyer? It’s a means, not an end. Go to law school or go into the law, but
train as a lawyer
?

I hear she was very ambitious at school. She worked her tits off.

Was she in our year?

Year below, I replied.

What did she read?

English, I think.

Then the numbers don’t add up. She said she’s just finishing two years at Harvard.

Zafar always spotted things like this. I paused to do the arithmetic. English was a three-year degree, and she was a year behind us. My friend was right. And, in fact, I later learned that after Oxford she spent a year studying art history in Florence and another year working for Sotheby’s in London, though these facts are of no consequence.

I see what you mean. Two years are missing, I said.

Exactly. Do you think she’s calculating? he asked.

You’re the one doing the calculating.

No, I mean
calculating
.

Maybe she’s indecisive. Some people just have to keep their options open. They don’t know what they want—they can’t help it.

Maybe both, he said.

*   *   *

That, then, was how I thought he met her: with my introduction. The truth of it was rather different and it leaves me uncomfortable. In another of our conversations, which took place in the week after he gave his account of meeting Penelope Hampton-Wyvern for the first time, Zafar told a story about Emily Hampton-Wyvern, something that happened some years before that evening at the South Asia Society, but in his usual way he approached the business apparently from a tangent, setting down another piece of the picture, a lemma. He said that he had always been drawn to people with interesting names, and he explained, quite matter-of-factly, that before he met Emily, he had fallen in love with her name, the whole of her name. But this was not, he went on, the first time he had fallen under such a spell.

Zafar reminded me that at Oxford he’d had a blazing affair with a Jewish Rhodes Scholar from New York. In those days, before cell phones and email, college porters took down telephone messages for students and pinned them onto a large corkboard in the post room by the lodge, small pieces of yellow paper, folded once, with the names of the recipients on the outsides. Porters came in every few minutes during the day to pin messages to the board, while students milled about checking for messages and mail. At night there were fewer calls, these from overseas, but the porters still came and posted the messages as they arrived. The college had a large number of international students.

In the freshers’ week of his first year, explained Zafar, he was mesmerized by the post room. I once saw a notice, he said, admonishing students for scaling the scaffolding that had been erected in the front quad for renovation work taking place there.
Anyone caught climbing on the scaffolding will be hung thereon
, it read. I remember thinking that objects were
hung
, while people were
hanged.
The next day, someone had drawn a line through the warning, leaving the original text still legible, and had inserted underneath,
Anyone caught hung like scaffolding will be climbed upon.
Then the day after that, the notice, with its witty edit, had been moved to the locked glass-fronted case beside the main gate, ordinarily reserved for announcements for all the world to see of scholarships, academic honors, and more orthodox signals of the college’s pool of talent.