by Ami Rao
‘Oh hey!’ Peggy said smiling widely. ‘Didn’t realize you’d be home! You painting? Can I see?’
‘What are you doing?’ Ameena replied, staring at Peggy’s feet, at her shoes on Peggy’s feet.
‘What do you mean?’ Peggy asked, and then, following Ameena’s glance, she said, ‘Oh, I just borrowed your shoes.’
‘Oh, you just borrowed my shoes?’
‘Ameena, you weren’t home, or I’d have asked. I’ve borrowed your shoes lots of times before, you’ve never cared!’ Peggy said, sounding genuinely surprised.
‘Peggy, those shoes you’ve borrowed in the past cost £10 from a shop called Poundsmart where nothing in the entire shop costs more than ten quid – the shoes on your feet cost $400 from Barney’s and were bought explicitly for my show. You should have the sense to know the difference,’ Ameena snapped and then went into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
‘I love Peggy,’ she told David later that night on the phone, ‘but she’s got too many boundary issues. Not surprising really given all that childhood trauma. Anyway, tonight was just the final straw kinda thing, I’ve been thinking about this for a while, I need to move out.’
The following morning, Ameena, who usually worked through her lunch breaks at the magazine, rang David and asked if he could meet her for lunch at the café across from the advertising agency.
‘It’s fine,’ she said coolly into the phone. ‘I’m entitled to a proper lunch once in a while that doesn’t involve eating a handful of nuts while staring at the computer. In any case, if Whitney paid me for all the hours I’ve spent working overtime, she wouldn’t be able to afford me.’
‘Shall I come to you?’ David asked cautiously.
‘No, I’m tired of everything around here. I’ll take the train to you, we can go to Arabella’s. I like their salads.’
And so, when he broached the subject for the second time, they were sitting at a window table at Arabella’s, a bright, contemporary space done in blues and oranges and chrome and glass, directly across the street from David’s work, and Ameena was toying with her arugula, staring into her laptop at the email Suzy had sent about possible themes for the next show.
‘Okay,’ she said distractedly, curling a few strands of long black hair around her index finger, still focused intently on her email.
‘Really?’ he asked, reaching across the table and rubbing his thumb on her cheek.
‘Yes, sure,’ she said squinting at her laptop. ‘Let’s shortlist some places tonight and go look at them at the weekend. Shadows? Do you think as a theme for the next show? Faith? Identity? Identity – God, I barely have my own identity figured out, my work’s meant to have identity?’
She had dropped her finger to type something and he noticed that the strands of hair she had been playing with now fell loosely by the side of her face, a series of pretty curlicues.
‘Wow, this is a change of heart… last time…’
She popped a candied pecan into her mouth and shrugged. ‘Last time there was no expectation of my saying no. This time there was no expectation of my saying yes. Shit!’ she swore suddenly, jumping up with a start and snapping her laptop shut.
‘What?’
‘I am on deadline for the magazine. I totally forgot. Piece on boyfriend jeans. Whitney’s obsession.’
‘Quit.’
‘What?’
‘Quit your job, paint full-time, move in with me.’
‘…make my breakfast, massage my feet, iron my underwear?’ she said, raising her eyebrows.
‘I’m serious. I’ll never borrow your shoes.’
‘I don’t know that,’ she said with a wink as she walked outside and hailed a cab.
But the following Saturday, after informing Peggy (not without some guilt) that she needed a bigger workspace – no, it had nothing to do with the shoes; yes, they would obviously still be friends; yes, it had something to do with David; no, of course she wasn’t sure she was ready, but who the hell ever is; yes, she was positive it wasn’t the shoes – Ameena moved in with David into a small, more than slightly ramshackle two-bedroom rented apartment in a white stucco building in the West Village, a tenth-floor corner space that – its only saving grace – looked directly across onto the Hudson River through capacious New York-style windows. ‘It feels like being on a boat,’ Ameena said to David, as she lowered herself onto a carboard box and, crouching on all fours, pushed it towards him, sliding like a skier across the worn but still beautiful herringbone floor – ‘so open, so… free.’ She stood up suddenly and gazed across the water. ‘My second show, Mr Greenberg, is going to be themed around Freedom and I’m going to sell out the fucking gallery.’
2.17
Reclining on the Eames lounge chair in his office – real leather, solid cherry, and one hundred percent genuine – Hershel was anxious.
The previous morning, just after he’d woken from sleep and to his acute embarrassment, he had leaked before he made it to the toilet, and then, when he managed to get to the toilet – literally sprinting from his bedroom – he had felt an uncomfortable burning sensation during the act.
Hershel didn’t like that.
His father had died of prostate cancer and his uncle before him, the latter at only forty-two. Forty-two! Imagine that! When life begins at forty! Or so the Hallmark birthday cards decreed with such authority. Which meant, if one believed that kind of thing (should one believe that kind of thing?), that the poor man’s life had ended almost as soon as it had begun.
And so, as far as Hershel was concerned, the episode from the previous morning didn’t bode well.
Hershel said nothing to his wife. He had learned many years ago that it was best, as far as his wife was concerned, to keep unnecessary chit-chat to a minimum. And so, saying nothing had hardly been the result of any kind of deliberate construct; it was habit – it simply hadn’t occurred to him to tell her. Instead, he went to work at the usual time and proceeded to spend the day in his office with the door closed, sitting on his prized Eames chair, which no one else was allowed to sit on – Hershel’s Rules – in a kind of terrified daze.
When he returned home that evening, at the usual time, his wife looked at his face, deathly pale and drawn, and asked while she prepped the linguine, ‘What in heaven bites you?’
But he didn’t reply, just poured himself a glass of whisky on ice and ate his linguine like an obedient child, even though it was over-salted, overcooked and bland. Funny, he thought, looking at his cherubic wife as she sucked the last linguine off her plate with the expertise of a native Bensonhurstite and generously helped herself to more – who would’ve thought an Italian couldn’t cook Italian?
Hershel hardly slept a wink that night, and felt, when his sleeping wife with her unimpeachable health turned on her side to face him, a sharp, surprising envy.
The following day at the office was more or less an unhappy rerun of the previous one, spent on the Eames chair, doing no work, doing absolutely nothing, crippled by the fear of dying, until that young, unfairly handsome lady-magnet of a David had knocked on his door and shown him the revised pitch for the chocolate milk company – an argument, he explained, built on health and positive feelings rather than on cold, hard, capitalistic facts and figures.
‘I’ll peruse it,’ Hershel said in a miserable voice, and if David had hesitated at the door, he didn’t notice. For the next hour, Hershel went through the pitch dully, not because it did not merit excitement, but because his present state of mind precluded anything but malaise.
And then. And then, he came upon a page titled: ‘How Emotions Can Make You Sick’.
‘Our subjective self (David wrote) is constantly creating information molecules that control our health and psychology. In other words, our emotional selves ceaselessly produce physical changes. Ergo: can choco + milk own your emotional health?’ And so on…
At which point something within Hershel’s paralysed soul sparked a tiny flicker of life.
For what young David had so cleverly introduced as a conversation idea, Hershel thought, heaving himself up from the chair – designed, they said, to look like a baseball mitt, so it could fit one’s body like a glove – with a vigour absent from his being for the past two days, was exactly the kick up the ass that he needed.
Because – he realised this now and the truth filled him like a warm dose of ambrosia – it was not the painful pee alone that was making him sick, it was the fear and anxiety surrounding the painful pee. The Event, not in its simple static state, but in all its dynamic possibilities, a kind of projection of sorts – what it could mean and would mean and must mean. Which was exactly the same kind of fear and anxiety he had been consumed by when he married the Italian, when (by some monstrous accident) his son was born, and when that son turned out to be gay.
Not the actual happenings per se, but the deeper significance of what The Event(s) implied. For him and to him and about him.
As in:
I’ve married a woman I don’t love.
I’ve had a child I never wanted.
The child I never wanted from the woman I don’t love has felt this palpable absence of love.
Ergo I, Hershel Eli Horowitz, am single-handedly to blame for the dubious sexual orientation of my one and only Bubbala bambino.
There. He had said it. He had finally fucking said it.
Hershel inhaled noisily, profoundly moved by his own remarkable display of courage.
Yes. The projection from each of these Events had, in sequence, caused him immense mental trauma over the course of his adult life. Unspeakable stress. He had self-destructed his own emotional health. He had allowed himself, in his own life, to be ruled by pathos – emotional appeal, suffering, the ancient Greeks called it.
And, incredible putz that he was, he was doing it to himself, once again.
What, after all, thought Hershel when he had composed himself sufficiently, was cancer of the prostate (if indeed he did have it), compared to a cancer of the mind? Peanuts! Literally!
And with that, Hershel E. Horowitz, God of Branding, felt as if the odious weight that had sat on his shoulders for nearly thirty years had finally been lifted. And by that piano-playing mensch!
The fact of the matter was that Hershel had known in his heart, even on the day he had hired David, that the boy would eventually leave, that he was much too talented a musician to stay doing this stuff. Yet, he had hired him because he had been too greedy not to, but had always carried, as a result of it, some small resentment towards the boy, because unlike him, when it came down to the expansive question of what one wanted to do with one’s life, he, Hershel did not have choices. But at this point in time, even that could not diminish David.
For thanks to David alone, Hershel now knew with a kind of startling clarity exactly what he needed to do.
He needed to own his emotional health.
And he needed to do that now.
Own now.
(Well! And wasn’t that a perfectly splendid anagram that could be put to work fairly imminently!)
But for the moment, more precious things beckoned.
Once he was sure David had left the vicinity of his office, he opened his desk drawer and pulled out his Rolodex containing the phone numbers of all his worldly contacts – there must have been hundreds of them, arranged by Sally, his secretary, in alphabetical order. Hershel, however, knew what he was looking for, and when he found it, the small rectangular, cream-coloured business card with the neat italicised print, he stopped and picked up the phone.
‘Can I help you? Hold the line please,’ asked/said the clipped voice of the receptionist somewhere higher up on Madison Avenue.
‘Oh yes,’ he replied cheerfully to no one, ‘you sure can.’
And while Hershel held the phone to his ear, listening to one of those badly remixed showtunes (What was this? ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning’? But how apt!) that are expressly chosen to be played on a loop to make one hang up the phone and give up on life altogether, he felt almost happy. Because what was it that the famous Australian writer had said? Or maybe he was English?
No one gets out alive?
That’s right, Hershel thought, wanting to laugh out loud – stress-full or stress-free, everyone always dies.
2.18
‘Mum, I’ve met someone.’
Ameena had agonised over this particular phone call for days now, finding every reason she could think of to put it off, but then the move had happened so suddenly, and she was living with David now and she knew no matter how bad this would be, it would be far worse, if somehow they found out in some other way, through someone else or if she herself at some point in the future inadvertently let something slip.
But still, she worried. She worried that on top of everything else that she had done or not done that had caused her parents to be disappointed in her, this would be creating for them a whole new threshold of sadness.
She knew they worried about her. We always know who worries about us. She also knew they worried about her in a completely different way than they worried about Kareem, almost in an antithetical way, as if between the two of them, neither she nor her brother had succeeded in providing a counterbalance to each other in a way that allows some parents to say with equanimity, ‘At least we have one child that turned out okay…’
Finally, she decided to do it, just do it, without thinking about it too much. Rip off the Band-Aid, as ‘they’ said – quickest way, best way, though she knew that ‘they’ were always saying something to make people feel a certain delusional optimism about life, which didn’t make any of what ‘they’ said particularly heartening at all.
She decided to call in the morning when David had gone for his run and when she knew Kareem would be at college – shit-stirrer, that’s what he was, he’d only make a bad situation worse. Better to speak to her parents first.
And so…
‘Mum, I’ve met someone,’ she said, then held her breath.
‘Ohhhh Ameena,’ her mother was literally gurgling, ‘that is wonderful! My child! My daughter! But, who is the boy? Is it someone we know? Is it Aunty Neelum’s son?’
‘Mum, I haven’t met Aunty Neelum since the first week I arrived, and I haven’t met her son, ever.’
‘Then who?’
‘Ok Ammi, I need you not to overreact. O-kay?’ she said very slowly and calmly.
On the other end of the phone line, she heard a low gasp. ‘Ameena, is he… is he A BLACK?’
‘Dear God, Mum.’
‘Ameena.’ Swift and sharp. A warning.
‘No! No! He’s not black. Okay? Happy? Though, I’m really quite offended that you would find that problematic in any—’
‘Oh God, he’s a HINDU?’
‘No! Mum! Listen, he’s not Hindu. He’s not Indian. Or Pakistani. He’s American. He’s… white.’
‘Ohhh Christian. Thank GOD. That is bad, but not terrible. Terrible, but not unthinkable. Christian is still Christian. Confessing lies to wooden boxes and all such cuckoo business. But still, it is a religion of the book. It could be worse.’ Ameena could literally see the shudder pass through her mother’s body.
She sighed. ‘Uh… Mum, he’s not, exactly, Christian. He’s Jewish.’
A strange choking sound. Then silence.
Ameena grimaced. ‘Judaism is… also a religion of the book,’ she ventured.
She could hear a faint crackling on the phone. Nothing else.
‘Umm… so, like I was saying… David is Jewish, but he’s not observant.’
‘Oh, very good, very good! One un-religious Muslim and one un-religious Jew! What do you think, two bad people make one good person? Two infidels make one fidel? Chee! Chee! Chee! Sha
me on you both.’
‘Mum, are you crying?’
‘No, no, I am not crying,’ she wailed. ‘I am laughing. I am celebrating that my daughter has broken my heart. Ameena, they are slaughtering us in Palestine. Slaughtering us like goats and sheeps.’
‘Sheep.’
‘What?’
‘It’s sheep. Not sheeps. He’s got nothing to do with Palestine. Look, let me speak to Dad.’
There was a muffled sob followed by a silence that seemed to last forever. Then Ameena heard her father’s voice – soft-spoken and gentle. Calming. A waterfall gurgling over smooth rock. The same effect on her as it had always had.
‘Ameena…’
‘Abbu… I…’
‘Ameena, I would advise you against all this. The world is not kind to those who make such choices. But you are a grown woman now, you must make your own decisions. I can only advise you and I think you already knew my feelings before you made this phone call.’
‘Abbu…’
‘We will speak later, Ameena, when I have thought about your situation more carefully. Please speak to your mother.’
‘His parents will hate you,’ Ameena’s mother cried. She seemed to be sobbing now, loudly and openly.
‘He doesn’t have parents, Mum.’
At this, Zoya let out a long, doleful howl.
‘Orphan! You want to marry orphan who has never been loved by parents! How will such a person love his wife?’
‘God Ammi, his parents died. Can you show some compassion? Anyway, we aren’t getting married. I’m just… well… I’m just dating him.’
‘But, Ameena – orphan?’ She was begging now, pleading, Ameena could hear it in her voice.
‘Well, his parents won’t hate me now, will they?’
‘Yes, but he will make you into his dead mother. I am warning you Ameena, I know how it is with these white boys and their mothers. Joined together on the hip. Even if it is dead hip on ghost mother.’
