A Persian Gem

by Jeff Isaacson

  I thought, sure, perhaps the Impressionists failed to make an impression on…I’d call my dad a zombie, but at least zombies want and work for brains. Calling my dad a zombie is an insult to the drive and the work ethic of the average zombie. He was more like a mummy. And my brother and I were diligently searching for whatever would activate his curse. Because that would’ve been an improvement.

  And I think that’s part of the reason why my brother did what he did as we sat beside a little Rue in a café in Paris. The waiter came up to us. He turned both my dad’s and my brother’s wine glass over.

  I mean, seriously? I believe that my brother was fourteen. And he looked like he was twelve. (Because one thing that’s nice about being half black is that we don’t crack.) And they turned his wine glass over?

  So he ordered a glass of the house red. Awkwardly, he had no idea what he was asking for. He didn’t realize that “wine” wasn’t specific enough. And he hadn’t cribbed on all the European languages that we might encounter the way that I had. He didn’t even know that vin was what he was trying to order. Finally, the confused waiter said, “House wine, sir?” in impeccable English.

  “Your finest,” my brother nodded.

  The response clearly perplexed the waiter, but he understood the nod. “Right away, sir,” he said.

  Don’t let anyone tell you that the French, and especially Parisians, are rude. I’ve seen no evidence of that. My experience has been that Parisians are very friendly, especially if you make an effort to speak French.

  The waiter eventually returned with a bottle of wine and poured a glass for my dad and my brother. If anything would’ve aroused my dad from his stupor in a blind rage. If anything would’ve triggered the mummy’s curse…That was it.

  My dad hated alcohol with a passion that was completely unrivaled and out of character in what was admittedly a pretty stoic guy even before he made zombies look like go getters. My dad’s brother is a low, mean, bottom of the barrel gutter drunk of an alcoholic. My dad’s father, who, before he died young (from drinking), was regularly verbally, emotionally, and occasionally even physically abusive to my dad and my uncle, was a raging alcoholic. My dad was possibly the only dad in America who would’ve rather had us end up as crack or meth addicts than alcoholics. My dad thought that alcohol was the root of all the evil in the world. He never touched a drop. Ever. No champagne at his wedding to my mom. He belonged to a fraternity in college and probably went down in history as the first frat boy to consume no alcohol whatsoever, under any circumstances. My dad went to extreme lengths to avoid alcohol.

  And at that moment a glass of wine was perched in front of him, and he just continued to sit slouched over in the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker, if The Thinker was black, middle aged, and had a lobotomy.

  Even worse, his son was becoming an alcoholic literally right in front of him! His teenage son was openly drinking wine literally right under his nose!

  And he didn’t care.

  So my brother ordered several glasses of wine and was feeling no pain by the time I got us all out of there. My dad was unable to feel any more pain. The evidence of that was that he just paid our bill, including a half dozen glasses of wine for my brother, the way that he would just absentmindedly sign whatever bill, or check, or credit card receipt that my brother and I put under his nose.

  To make clear how poorly this augured for my dad. Imagine a one-time nurturing, caring parent taking their kids to dinner. Then, at some point, one of the kids breaks out their pipe and smokes either crack or meth right in front of that parent. Then imagine that their dealer comes up to the café with another hit of crack or meth and the kid gets that parent to pay for it. Now bear in mind that my dad thought that alcohol was even worse than crack or meth.

  I knew it was over. I knew that the trip would fail in its purpose.

  And it did.

  But before it did, at least my brother and I got to see some things. And one of those things was not the Weisswald, but the Schwarzwald.

  Schwarz is black in German. Wald is forest. So Schwarzwald was the famous Black Forest.

  My brother and I hiked all over in there. My dad opted to stay at a picnic table.

  When we came back like five hours later, I think that my dad was in the exact same position, slouched over, head heavy and leaning on one hand balled into a fist.

  Because the Schwarzwald used to be written as the Schwartzwald, a lot of people are named Schwartzwalder. The German way to denote that a person is from a specific place is by ending –er to the end. So a Schwartzwalder is literally one who is from the Black Forest. Just like a Frankfurter is not just a hot dog. A Frankfurter is also a person from Frankfurt. And a Wiener is not just a childish insult. A Wiener is also the way to describe a person who is from Vienna in German. And JFK was right when he said, “Ich bin ein Berliner!” He didn’t say that he was a jelly doughnut. He said, “I am of Berlin” approximately. Granted, I believe that Berliner can mean both a person from Berlin and a jelly doughnut, but it’s obvious from the context which is which. If I were to say Ich esse ein Berliner, or I eat a Berliner, then it’s obvious that I’m saying that I am eating a jelly doughnut because I am not a cannibal.

  So a Schwartzwalder is from the Black Forest, a Frankfurter is from Frankfurt, a Wiener is from Vienna, and a Berliner is from Berlin, but where is a Weisswalder from? I guess obviously a White Forest somewhere, but where?

  The White Forest sounded like a place that only existed in imagination. I never watched “Game of Thrones”, but even I feel like I know enough about the story to say that the White Forest sounds like it could be one of the kingdoms on the show. (If I’m wrong, I’m sorry.) It seems like a place out of a Fantasy novel or a fairy tale where elves and wise, benevolent sorcerers, with the help of the one normal person who represents us, are trying to rescue a prince or princess from a black palace, ruled by some evil sorceress and guarded by a monster army, with nothing more than that supreme elven archery skills, white magic, and an all-powerful object that our almost human character was gifted by the silver empress once he freed her from the green lake.

  That was the beauty of the name Gertrude Weisswalder though. Almost everything that is beautiful in this life is beautiful, at least in part, because of how rare it is. And the name Gertrude Weisswalder was as rare as they come. Gertrude Weisswalder was a perfectly weird name.

  So I resorted to one of the oldest investigative tricks in the book. I turned to the Yellow Pages. Well, technically the White Pages, and technically I looked it up online on my phone, but it was the same general idea.

  I easily located Gertrude Weisswalder’s name in the digital phone book and called her. She didn’t answer, but she had voicemail. So I left a message saying that I was a true crime writer who had just found out about what had recently happened to her. I wanted to write a book about the theft, and I would like to interview her about her experience.

  Then I left my name and number. I hung up and went for a run.

  I checked my phone when I got back. I was excited. I saw that I had a call from a number with an area code that I didn’t recognize. And they had left a voicemail. Unfortunately, it must have been a robocall, because the voicemail was just four seconds of nothing.

  So I went out to watch the sea fold over and over on itself like it was futilely trying to fold an infinite aquamarine blanket while sea birds glided down and dipped an occasional beak into the ephemeral seltzer bubbles that kept rising and falling with the rolling folds. The sand looked almost white where I sat. Very few shells washed up that high, even with the highest of high tides. The ones that did had mostly broken into jagged, colorful fragments. They looked like the bigger crumbs on the bottom of a bag of some fantastic new flavor of rippled potato chips. The sun was a fiery yellow, and the warmth and intensity of that sun was still shocking to a woman who had just escaped a Minnesota winter.

  I lingered on the shore for a while. I had seen a little restaurant that I hadn’t stopped
at yet just a short ways down the beach. So I walked down and ate a grouper reuben, which was outstanding, and went back to the beach.

  I knew that it was getting close to time to go to the exact same restaurant with the exact same people by the sun angle. It was strange that I was still genuinely surprised by just how hot and intense the Florida sun was, even in January. But I was not surprised that I had already adapted to Florida sunrise and sunset patterns well enough to be a human sundial.

  I had left my phone at home. I didn’t even check it right away when I got back.

  I threw on a blouse and some shorts. There, I was ready. Thad need not be anxious on my account.

  Then, I went to my phone. To my surprise, I did have a message! From Gertrude Weisswalder! Or at least the number that I had called.

  My hands were shaking as I awkwardly fumbled into my voicemail and tried to play the message, accidentally starting and stopping it twice. Eventually I heard the whole thing. She loved writers, especially true crime writers. She insisted that I stop by around noon the following day.

  I was grinning from ear to ear when Thad came in.

  “I didn’t know that they had a bird here,” Thad shook his head. “But you need to cough up that canary you just ate and figure out how to bring it back to life before Farhad and his fiancée get here and we have adult supervision.”

  4

  Gertrude Weisswalder’s home was at the far end of the island, in Captiva. It was a long bike ride on uncomfortably narrow roads, during which time I pissed off many a driver simply by existing and being on a bicycle.

  But I got there.

  I stood on the pedals as I glided up the short driveway. The bike seat on Farhad’s cruiser had not been a friend to my backside.

  I parked the bike in between the first and second garage stall instead of between the second and third garage stall. I made my way toward an absolute tropical color McMansion. In fact, I think that some powdered beverage company should make a new drink called Tropical McMansion, and when you stir a little Tropical McMansion into your flat or sparkling water, it will turn a color that I can only describe as very artificially flavored lime taffy.

  A hammock smiled between two palms curling slightly away from each other. The hammock appeared to be made out of updated pieces of rope ladder from faux ship rigging inspired by the copious passages on whaleboats in Melville’s works. If I had to guess, I would guess that hammock cost at least a grand, probably more.

  The windows in the lime taffy house shined with such marked clarity. It was almost hard to see that the windows were even there.

  The almost total transparency of the windows made the house seem like some Pop Art piece where a lime taffy colored rectangle just had rectangular holes cut into it at regular intervals. An art historian might describe the work as a Jack o’ Lantern reimagined as a not quite square Key lime that makes us wonder if we really know the things that we all think that we really know.

  I could see the view in the back as I was biking up. The lime taffy house had one of the best, maybe even the best view of the Gulf that I had yet to see. It was perfection.

  I still liked Farhad’s place better, because it had a much bigger yard. And that yard had a perimeter like a jungle, so no one could see me going in there.

  Because Farhad’s place was one of those kind of places. The kind of places where some concerned white woman might report me to the police if she saw me entering the passcode to shut off the alarm.

  And so was this lime taffy McMansion.

  So I walked carefully up to the front door, as if that would help.

  The door was a pastel pink. There was a literal door-bell with a rope for me to pull. So I pulled the rope.

  I heard a loud clink-clink-clink fade away, little by little.

  The door suddenly opened, and I found myself looking at a female butler. Her livery was interesting. It was almost a tuxedo for a woman, with the longer tails in back, but it wasn’t as high quality as a tuxedo. The colors were all the same though, black coat, white shirt, black tie, black pants, and black shoes.

  The female butler looked very young to me. I would have guessed sixteen. I would have guessed that this was her first job. But I knew from my last investigation that I was getting oldish, and I was consistently underestimating the age of people younger than me. Perhaps in a kind of Freudian way to reinforce my desire to believe that I’m younger than I am. Perhaps not. Either way, I significantly underestimated the age of college students in my last investigation. So this female butler was probably college aged or maybe had just completed college. (Can you major in butlery in college?)

  I bet she gets carded when she tries to buy lottery tickets though.

  Wait, who am I kidding? She tries to buy those lottery tickets in Florida.

  “Are you Angie?” the woman asked me.

  I looked up into her pleasant green eyes. I looked at her slicked back auburn hair pulled into a tight ponytail. I looked at her pale, porcelain skin, lightly kissed with a stray freckle or two. I said, “I am.”

  “Right this way,” the woman beckoned me to follow her.

  “Take my shoes off?” I asked as I stepped onto what looked like thousands of dollars of rich, Persian carpets.

  The servant just turned to look at me as though I had asked her, “Why do dewberries mammer?”

  Then she walked on. So I followed.

  We walked by an exercise room, past a cavernous room, wild with floral life, and finally past a study with an amazing antique desk adorned with an antique typewriter and an antique globe, among other things.

  The butler led me into a library. The walls were floor to ceiling shelves of a variety of hardcover books. There were little step ladders, and one big ladder on wheels in the room. There was a little nook with four chairs in two sets facing each other in the far corner of the room. Gertrude Weisswalder seemed to have planned to have me “catch her” in an affected pose of standing over a book and appearing to ponder its abstruse mysteries. If that was her intent, it was mission accomplished.

  We introduced ourselves.

  As we did, I studied this Gertrude. She was spry, tall for a woman, pencil thin, still had what looked like some natural color in her blondish, gray hair, and had remarkably few wrinkles. I am almost certain that if I went strictly by appearance, I would have probably underestimated her age by at least twenty years. I knew from the research that I had done ahead of time that she was eighty.

  Her blue eyes were expressive and cunning. Her eyes were the eyes of a child that knows that they’re up to mischief.

  Her face was angular, craggy even, cheeks almost like the faces of a granite mountain. The flesh that had made that face beautiful years ago had withered, dried, and hardened under the forces of nature.

  “As you can see I love books,” Gertrude gestured all around the room. “But probably not as much as you. I’m so glad you came. I love the true crime genre, and I always wanted to meet someone who writes in it.”

  “I’m happy to meet you too,” I glad handed.

  “So we can get to the interview in just a minute, if you don’t mind. First I’d like to talk just a little bit about the true crime genre with someone who must be an expert in it,” Gertrude rubbed her bony hands together with delight.

  I swallowed hard.

  “Tell me, what is your favorite true crime book?” Gertrude asked.

  “Boy, I don’t know…There are so many,” I hemmed and hawed.

  “Then pick one,” she insisted.

  “Um, I guess if I have to pick just one…In Cold Blood?” I prayed.

  “Of course, a classic,” Gertrude nodded. “I was expecting something more obscure, but Capote’s work is an absolute classic. Tell me, what did you like most about In Cold Blood?”

  “The…title,” I decided.

  Gertrude stared at me for a moment. And I tried to stay strong and not look like a kid who just got busted for not reading the book that they were supposed to do their book
report on.

  “Yes,” Gertrude nodded. “I never would’ve thought of that, but that must be why you’re a writer and I’m not. Of course. It’s a great title. It’s a title that does exactly what a title should do. It’s a title that makes a person want to buy and then read the whole book. It’s so much better than…I mean look at a classic novel, a great novel. Lolita is just an absolute classic novel, but what a terrible title. It’s not like Lolita is a famous person or something. It’s just the name of some girl we don’t even know yet. Why would anyone want to read that based on the title?”

  I couldn’t help but wonder why Gertrude had selected that particular novel as an example of a poorly titled classic. I hadn’t read Lolita, but I knew enough about it to know that it was a novel that glorified statutory rape. I certainly didn’t think that it would be anybody’s first choice as a poorly named classic novel other than the people who show up on that To Catch a Predator show. You know the show. It’s the one where guys think that they’re going to secretly meet up with like a fourteen year old girl whose parents are out of town for the weekend. And of course those guys bring like a quart of vodka, some mixers, and an industrial size box of condoms. Then, when they get caught, they all claim that this was some weird scared straight intervention. Like they were going to go in there and say, “You need to stop soliciting men online! Because this is what could have happened! I could’ve plied you with this copious amount of alcohol I brought as a prop until you were too drunk to resist anything! Then I could have used this industrial sized box of condoms! Shape up, Missy! Or you’ll be on one of Sally Jesse Raphael’s boot camp shows before you know it!”

  Guys like that probably love Lolita and think that the author, Nabokov, is the only real writer out there. The only guy who dares to tell the truth.

  So why would this eighty year old woman pick Lolita. Even if she just wanted to give an example of a novel that some consider a classic that was nothing more than the name of a person we didn’t know, how could she not come up with Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, or at least Anna Karenina before Lolita? Then I thought of the barely legal butler again. Was she playing some weird, rich person’s, Eyes Wide Shut caliber lesbian literary sex games in here?