Two months later I quit the company. I enrolled in graduate school at NYU, but stayed on in Tel Aviv through the summer, and flew back only days before the start of the semester. Romi had met Amir by then, an entrepreneur fifteen years older than her, with so much money that he spent most of his time looking for ways to give it away. He wooed Romi with the same singular drive he applied to everything he wanted. A few days before my flight, Romi threw a goodbye party for me at our favorite restaurant, and all the dancers came, and our friends, and most of the boys we’d slept with that year. Amir didn’t come because he was busy, and the following day Romi left for Sardinia on his yacht. I packed up my things alone. I was sad to leave and wondered if I’d made a mistake.
For a while, we stayed in close touch. Romi got married, moved to Amir’s mansion on a cliff above the Mediterranean, and got pregnant. I studied toward my degree and fell in love, and then out of it a couple of years later. In the meantime, Romi had two children, and sometimes she sent me photos of those boys, whose faces were hers and seemed to borrow nothing from their father. But we were in touch less and less, and then whole years passed in which we didn’t speak at all. One day, soon after my daughter was born, I was passing a cinema on Twelfth Street and I felt someone’s gaze, and when I turned I saw Ershadi’s eyes staring out at me from the poster for Taste of Cherry. I felt a shiver up my spine. The screening had already passed, but no one had taken down the poster. I took a photo of it, and that night I sent it to Romi, reminding her of a plan we’d once hatched to go to Tehran—me with a fresh American passport without Israeli stamps, and her with the British one she had through her father—to sit in the cafés and walk the streets that were the setting of so many films we loved, to taste life there, and lie on the beaches of the Caspian Sea. We were going to find Ershadi, who we imagined would invite us into the sleek apartment he had designed himself and listen while we told him our stories, and then tell us his own while we drank black tea with a view of the snow-capped Elburz Mountains. In the letter, I admitted to her the reason I’d cried the night she told me about her encounter with Ershadi. Sooner or later, I wrote, I would’ve had to admit that in the blaze of my ambition, I’d failed to check myself. I would have had to face how miserable I was, and how confused my feelings about dancing had become. But the desire to seize something from Ershadi, to feel that reality expanded for me as it had for her, that the other world came through to touch me, had hastened my revelations.
I didn’t hear back from Romi for weeks, and then finally her answer arrived. She apologized for taking so long. It was strange, she said. She hadn’t thought of Ershadi for years, until three months before, when she’d decided to watch Taste of Cherry again. She’d recently left Amir, and on nights when she couldn’t sleep in the new apartment, with its unfamiliar smells and noises from the street, she would stay up watching movies. What surprised her was how differently Ershadi’s character struck her this time. While she’d remembered him as passive, nearly saintlike, now she saw that he was impatient and often surly with the men he approached, and manipulative in the way he tried to get them to agree to what he wanted, sizing up their vulnerabilities and saying whatever was necessary to convince them. His focus on his own misery, and his single-minded desire to carry out his plan, struck her as self-absorbed. What also surprised her, because she didn’t remember it, were the words that appear for a moment on the black screen before the film begins, as all films in Iran must: “In the name of God.” How could she have missed that the first time? she wondered. Of course she’d thought of me as she lay in the dark and watched—of that year when we were still so young and spoke endlessly of men. How much time we wasted, she wrote, believing that things came to us as gifts, through channels of wonder, in the form of signs, in the love of men, in the name of God, rather than seeing them for what they were: strengths we dragged up from the nothingness of our own depths. She told me about a film she wanted to write when she finally got the time, which followed the story of a dancer like me. And then she told me about her boys, who needed her for everything, it seemed, just as the men in her life had always needed her for everything. It was good, she wrote, that I had a daughter. And then, as if she had forgotten that she had already moved on to other things, as if we were still sitting across from each other deep in one of our conversations without beginning, middle, or end, Romi wrote that the last thing that had surprised her was that when Ershadi is lying in the grave he’s dug and his eyes finally drift closed and the screen goes black, it isn’t really black at all. If you look closely, you can see the rain falling.
Future Emergencies
For a long time they said we didn’t need them, but then something changed and they said that we did: gas masks. This was after 9/11, after the establishment of Homeland Security, when the factory of America’s imagination had achieved its peak production of threats, attacks, conspiracies. I was standing barefoot in the kitchen, listening to the radio turned up loudly, as I liked to do in the morning. The radio! It gives the news a greater impact, and increases the drama of beginning another day in a world I’ve grown used to but know can change at any moment. When the announcement was made, my first instinct was to hold my breath in case whatever it was had already been released into the air. “What?” Victor asked, coming in and turning down the volume. I exhaled. “Gas masks,” I said.
But outside the window, the morning was pale and clear. There appeared to be nothing in the atmosphere beyond the invisible blessing of oxygen. Other things too, equally invisible: a trace of benzene, a low-level reading of mercury or dioxin maybe. But nothing we hadn’t learned to live with. Sometimes at dusk I watch runners on the track around the reservoir, their lungs pumping to take in the maximum cubic feet of air, and the thought occurs to me that maybe they belong to a more evolved subspecies, one actually benefiting from—actually able to break down and harness for energy—elements still toxic to the rest of us. Victor calls it the flagellation parade. He says that they’re wearing away their joints, grinding down cartilage. He says they’ll leave the world limping or crawling on all fours. But to me they seem the image of health: lithe, agile, unharmed by pollution. They know it makes the sunsets more beautiful, all of those particles in the air. The sky turns colors that seem to reflect the peculiar ache of being alive at that hour.
“The threat may not come from common pollutants or shifting winds,” the radio said. “It may not come from airborne pesticides, or a factory fire, or underground tests.” The coffeemaker purred, and Victor took two mugs off the shelf. “Where will the threat come from?” I asked aloud. I felt an intimate connection to the voice, at liberty to ask it questions. “The threat may come from an unknown source,” the radio replied. Even when the news is bad, I am glad to have been answered.
For the time being, the air was still safe to breathe, the radio said. It was all right to go outside, remembering to stop and get a mask at one of the distribution centers being set up in each neighborhood. Victor had been planning on staying in to grade papers, so I offered to pick up masks for both of us on my way back from work.
“If there’s a choice, I’d like the kind with the eyeholes and the snout. The anteater one,” Victor said, going to the door for the newspaper.
“I don’t think this is a time to be picky.”
“True,” said Victor, already absorbed in reading.
It was November, and outside the air was crisp and seemed to carry the promise of snow. What I miss about living in the country is the morbid beauty of the autumns. In the city the leaves just turn brown and scatter. Once I took Victor back to the farm where I grew up, and it rained the whole time. We tramped around in the mud and I tried to show him how to milk a cow, but he couldn’t stand the smell of the hot milk. When we finally left, he said that one had to have a sense of humor to grow up in a place like that. I didn’t explain to him how the dogs used to come into the house smelling of the fields.
I met Victor in my last year of college. He was the profe
ssor of my medieval history class. Victor is French, and so he didn’t have any hang-ups about going out with a student. After graduation I moved in with him and got a job giving tours at the Metropolitan Museum. Though the life we live together now feels like the only one I know, there are moments when I still imagine another life, with different things in it. A life with someone who is not Victor, and who is nothing like him.
On the steps down to the subway I passed a man coming up wearing a gas mask. It wasn’t the kind Victor was talking about. This one was fancier, with circles over the nose and mouth and on each cheek, the one on the left twice the size of the others, like a goiter. The man was wearing a red silk tie and a suit that looked like it had just been unwrapped from the dry cleaner. The sight of him was unnerving, and people stopped to stare. Some probably hadn’t heard the news that morning, and the ones that had were wondering if there had been an update. There had been warnings before about the possible need for the masks, but this was the first time they were actually being distributed, and obviously it set everyone on edge. When I went down to the subway platform, there were a few people who’d already gone to the distribution centers and were carrying their masks in cardboard boxes. I thought about going to pick ours up, but I was late for work and the first tour of the day is always my favorite. The light comes in softly through the skylights, illuminating the Madonnas and the saints.
There were only five people in my morning tour: a couple from Texas, a mother and daughter from Munich, and a cellist named Paul. He had beautiful hands. I noticed them when he touched his forehead. Everyone was feeling a little nervous, and we spent the first few minutes talking about the news in the hushed tones used in museums. When the group is small, I usually ask the visitors what they’re interested in and try to tailor the tour to their tastes. The man from Texas had a gold ring on his pinkie and said he was a big fan of Renoir. He pronounced it Rin-Waa, and his wife smiled in agreement.
Paul was interested in the museum’s photography collection, so I started off in the room with the Walker Evanses. I’ve always been struck by his photographs, their sparse and formal beauty. Here were these people caught in grim and hopeless lives, and he photographed them with the same precise detachment he would an old signboard. There’s something breathtaking about it, the lack of compassion in favor of cold clarity. There were a couple of photographs by Diane Arbus at the other end of the room, and I decided to show them to the group to give them a sense of the other end of the spectrum, someone who seemed to identify with her subjects on a terrifying level. Not only does Arbus seem to feel their unhappiness, I explained, but what’s more, they—the twins and the triplets, the misfit children, the odd couples, the tramps, the queens and freaks—seem to regard her with distraught looks, as if they recognize something darker and more haunting than their own lot. Sometimes, on a good day, that happens: as you talk, you find things you didn’t know you had to say.
I let the group look for a while in silence at the child clutching the toy grenade and the old woman in a wheelchair holding a witch’s mask over her face. I was a little worried about how the man from Texas would react, but I should have given him the benefit of the doubt because he ended up taking a big interest, going right up close and screwing up his face in concentration. Paul had drifted back over to the Walker Evanses. His hands made me think of delicate, impossible tasks. They made me think, I don’t know why, of a man on the flight that crashed into the icy Potomac, in whose pocket was found a picture of the woman he loved and a pair of laminated butterfly wings.
Before Victor I always dated men my own age. It’s hard to remember what they were like now, the smoothness of their skin, and how when I took my clothes off they seemed almost grateful. It’s even hard to remember what it felt like to be the person they loved, for whom the world was still opening. A person who is not, in some form, a refraction of Victor. When I first met him, I was practically a kid. He struck me as strong and utterly remarkable, a man against whose finished form I could lean to feel the pleasure of a permanent shape.
While I was eating lunch, one of the other guides, Ellen, who was thin and had a long neck, came into the staff room. She’d already picked up her mask, and put it on as a joke. She got right up in my face like the Texan in front of the Arbus, and peered down at me through the eyeholes. I let out a playful scream, but the truth was that the way she looked, like a giant praying mantis, gave me the creeps. Ellen started to bark with laughter, the sound trapped and muffled by the rubber mouthpiece. Then she pushed the mask back onto her head and finished the rest of her tuna-fish sandwich with the eyeholes staring blindly up at the ceiling. Sometimes Ellen and I talk about our relationships. Her boyfriend rock-climbs, calls her Lou, and got arrested for scalping tickets to Riverdance. She says I’m lucky to have a man with such refined taste, who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of ideas.
Victor’s sense of humor is also unusual. He’s a medievalist, which already suggests something about his tastes, but add to that the fact that he wrote his dissertation on the penal system in thirteenth-century Burgundy, and you begin to have a real sense of what a person like Victor might find funny. When we first started dating, I found the blackness of his humor charming. It drew attention to the difference in our ages, leaving me free to take on the role of the naive, uncorrupted youth. Soon Victor will be forty-five. When he doesn’t shave, some of the hairs in his beard come in silver, and sometimes, lying with my cheek against his, a sense of gratitude still comes over me and I love him more than ever. I have the feeling then that Victor is standing between me and some distant harm, and that his presence is what shields me from it. I curl myself up in his arms like a cat, and when he asks why I’m being so affectionate I only smile and rub my eyelid against the pleasant roughness of his chin.
My last tour at the museum ended at a quarter to five, and I got my coat and headed outside. The clocks had been turned back a week earlier, and I still hadn’t gotten used to the dark coming in so early. I always feel a little pang of hurt that first day when darkness falls without warning. It’s the slight, sickening feeling of being reminded of the reckless authority of time, of losing your bearings in a world whose dimensions you thought you’d learned to live with. I took my time getting back. I imagined Paul practicing somewhere in an empty auditorium. The park was emptier than usual, but the runners were still out, sprinting under the bare trees around the reservoir, the light from the lamps shining off the reflector guards on their sneakers and clothing.
The distribution center for our neighborhood was an elementary school on a quiet street of town houses. There were paper cutouts of turkeys and pilgrims in the window. When I got there, people were bustling in and out, gathering in little clots on the steps to share whatever they knew. Judging from what I overheard on the way in, it wasn’t much. At work I’d heard various speculations—the man from Texas thought that there had been some sort of meltdown at a nuclear plant, and Ellen insisted that a crop duster from Colombia had disappeared—but none were particularly credible. It seemed strange that no one was explaining the sudden need for gas masks, and also that the city had been prepared with enough masks on hand for everyone. But I assumed there were reasons. Victor says that I don’t question things enough. He says I accept the way things are without challenge. The first words he ever directed at me were written on the top of an essay I’d handed in. “Your argument is unclear,” he wrote. “See me.”
The distribution was set up in one of the classrooms. There was a master list with all of the residents’ names, and when I got to the front of the line for J through P, I had to explain that I was also picking one up for Victor Assoulen, and could I please have his without having to stand in the line for A through F. There was a small bureaucratic scuffle among the volunteers working on the other side of the blockade of children’s desks, but after I showed them an ID with an address that matched Victor’s, it got straightened out, and a woman in a velour tracksuit handed me two boxes. On my way out I s
topped to smile at a little girl hopping around in ballet slippers, and when I looked up again I noticed a note left on the blackboard. It read, in elegant teacher’s cursive, “Due Monday: Your predictions for the future.” I started to laugh, but caught myself when I turned back and met the cool gaze of the small prophet in scuffed ballet slippers.
Ask Victor, and he’ll tell you that the Middle Ages were more passionate times than these. Extreme contrasts and violent conflicts existed side by side, lending a thrilling vigor to life that order can’t provide. He’ll sit with you over a bottle of wine and explain to you in a breathlessly articulate manner how now all anyone wants is conflict resolution. They want to shake hands and settle matters; they want tolerance for all points of view, so long as those points of view are expressed through the proper channels and procedures. It’s not that Victor would have us all back in the thirteenth century, cheering in spasmodic effusion at public executions. His sense of morality is finely tuned. But he refuses to accept a system designed to reject conflict and force us all, like a fat lady through a keyhole, in the direction of a stable average. That’s the phrase he uses, a fat lady through a keyhole.
When I got home, Victor was standing in the kitchen knee-deep in shopping bags. He’d bought more food than we normally eat in a month, and was trying to find room for it all in our tiny kitchen. When he saw me standing in the door, he put down a jar of peanut butter he was trying to wedge between some soup cans, waded across the sea of plastic bags, and hugged me hard. Normally when I come home Victor peeks out from behind some book about minstrels and barely raises an eyebrow. It’s not that he isn’t glad to see me; he just likes to greet me in his own time. It’s as if there are two Victors, and between the intellectual Victor engaged in an ongoing critique of the suppression of conflict and the Victor who rubs my toes when I’m cold there is a powerful force field, and each day, like a superhero morphing back into his normal life, Victor must cross back through it to get me.
To Be a Man Page 10
