Messenger from Mystery

by Deno Trakas

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. What does she look like, Azadeh?”

  Now would be a good time to pull out pictures, I realized, but I didn’t have any of Azi or Nadia. I wondered what it said about me that I didn’t own a camera. “She looks kind of like, I don’t know, a young Sophia Loren, except not so voluptuous, and not so high-cheek-boned, and not so full-lipped.”

  She smiled and didn’t say what she could have: Does she look like Sophia Loren or not? Instead she asked, “Do you still keep in touch with her?”

  “Barely. I’ve written her letters, a lot of letters, but she’s written only once. I don’t know what’s going on over there with the mail.”

  “And now you’re dating the Kuwaiti girl?”

  “Yeah, a little.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Nadia’s great. She’s friendly, outgoing, funny, and very good to me.”

  “But the other girl is prettier, and you like her more?”

  Two minutes of conversation and a little intuition and my mom had nailed one of the truths of my relationships. “Well, it’s not that simple, but yeah. But of course Azi’s in Tehran now.”

  “It must be confusing. But I’m glad Nadia is good to you. That’s what a mother likes to hear.” She opened the oven to check on her casserole. “This’ll just be a few more minutes.”

  My mother stuffed me with chicken divan and catered to my wishes—brownies and ice cream—as if she knew I needed comfort, and knew just the foods to provide it. Pampering her children had never been her style, and her motive—to make me want to come back—was transparent, but so what. As we ate I asked her, finally, how she was doing. She said fine, usually, but sometimes . . . and then she started crying. I didn’t jump up to hug her but just sat silently as she wiped her eyes and nose with her napkin. “I’m sorry, Jason.”

  “You don’t have to apologize for being sad, Mom. I’m sad too. I miss him too.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course. I have weird little dreams about him all the time. Just last night I dreamed he was walking through the house, except he was a black bear looking for food.”

  She laughed. “That sounds like him, always hungry.”

  “Like father like son.”

  “Except that you never put on weight the way he did.”

  “I would if I worked in a restaurant or had meals like this all the time. Everything was delicious.”

  “Thank you. I enjoy cooking for you—I never get the chance anymore,” she said, standing. “Be sure to take all the leftovers home with you tomorrow.”

  “I will.”

  I got up to help clear the table, but she said, “Sit down and relax.”

  “No, Mom, I want to help.” I scraped our plates into the garbage can. “How’re your finances?”

  “Oh, fine. The money from the sale of the restaurant should be plenty, but I might drop the country club. And . . .” She didn’t look at me as she got out some Tupperware while I rinsed the dirty dishes and put them in the dishwasher. “I might put the house up for sale, it’s so empty now. I could go live with Jane—she’s asked me—and when the house sold, you and Barbara and I could split the money. A real estate agent told me he thought we could get about $55,000.”

  “For God’s sake, Mom, I’m sure it’s worth more than that. You’d be giving away the family home, where Dad grew up, where you raised your kids—doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “That’s the point, Jason—this is his house. I never wanted to live here. And every damn thing in it reminds me of him.” My mother never cussed, so her agitation was clear. I turned around and watched her finish clearing the table. “Even this table,” she said, “we bought it when I got pregnant with you.”

  An oval table with an indestructible blue laminate surface, not pretty, not ugly, but the only kitchen table we’d ever had. I thought she’d keep it forever. “If that’s the way you feel, Mom, fine—I just wish you’d mentioned it.”

  She turned to face me, spoke calmly. “You haven’t seemed interested. I talked it over with Barbara.”

  “And what does she think about all this?”

  “She said she wants me to do whatever will make me happy.”

  Barbara probably wanted her cut of the money, and I could definitely, easily, happily use my share. Still. Our house. “Of course I want you to be happy too, Mom.”

  “I just thought . . . of course, I won’t do it if y’all don’t want me to.” She lifted a pack of Virginia Slims from her apron pocket as if she were stealing them. She tapped one out, lit it and inhaled.

  “You should live where you want, Mom. If that’s with Aunt Jane, fine, move to Oklahoma. Of course I have a sentimental attachment to this house, but you shouldn’t keep it just for that reason. But you shouldn’t give it away either.”

  “Well, is there any chance that you’d move back to Spartanburg and live here?”

  “I don’t know. Not in the near future, not while I’m in school. I don’t know what’ll happen after that.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  The next morning, almost noon, I awoke well rested in my childhood bed, drank the coffee Mom had made before going to church, and then, after some difficulty with the Mexican operator, whose English was almost as handicapped as my Spanish, I heard a voice, clear and gruff, say, “Yeah.”

  “Is this Oman?” I asked.

  “The one and only. Who’s this?”

  “Jay Nichols. You remember me?”

  “Course I do. How you doing, Kid? How long’s it been?”

  “A couple of years at least. I didn’t know you’d moved.”

  “Yeah. When my mom died, I decided I needed a change of scenery. Good old Sparkle City, despite its many charms, was wearing a little thin. Where are you now?”

  “Right this minute I’m at my mom’s house in Spartanburg, but I live in Columbia. I’m finishing up my PhD at Carolina, and, in fact, that’s sort of why I’m calling.” I explained my assignment.

  “Is the school paying for this, Kid?”

  I thought it strange that he called me Kid since he was only a year older. “They’ll reimburse me.”

  “Good. Hold on while I get comfortable.” I heard a chair slide and a glass clink. Finally, “Okay, fire away. But let’s cut through the bullshit. You know my life’s story, and it’s dull as hell anyway. Ask me real questions.”

  “I’ll try. How would you classify what you write? I mean, can you place your fiction in a category or tradition, Oman?”

  “Call me Ishmael, Kid.”

  “Call me Jay, Oman.”

  “Okay Jay. But Bogart would call you Kid, and I’m in my Bogart period. My next book is about a guy who thinks he’s Bogart.”

  “Didn’t Woody Allen do something like that?”

  “Woody Allen’s a pansy. He’s funny, in that neurotic Jewish way, but a pansy. This guy’s the real thing.”

  “I notice that in Fair Game and Hot Jalapeño your main characters are also macho types. Is there a reason for that?”

  “Yeah, how else can you get them to have sex all the time? You think women are going to spread for a pansy? You think women are going to unbutton their blouses in libraries or slide a man’s hand up their skirts in a restaurant if the guy’s a ‘sensitive’ type?”

  “So sex is the main thing.”

  “Sex sells. That’s the main thing.”

  “You and Roth.”

  “He likes one-handed sex more than I do—I think he said the advantage is that you don’t have to talk afterwards.”

  I laughed, then said what I was thinking. “I get the feeling this is just a pose.”

  “Course it’s a pose. A writer’s always making things up, including himself. Hemingway made himself up to be a big sportsman and all. So does your boy Dickey there at Carolina. He’s a damn fine writer, but he’s got lots of poses. And costumes. Hats. Watches. It’s the thing to do, it’s all-American.”

  I wondered if that wa
s true, if Americans posed and put on other identities more than other peoples. Nadia didn’t pose. Azi didn’t. “Does anyone know what you’re really like?” I asked.

  “Well, you know me better than most, but I like to think I’m two people. We’re sitting here right now drinking juice and tequila. One of us writes and the other is the drinking partner—every writer needs a drinking partner—and sometimes when the writer gets stuck he turns it over to the drinker. A few of my best passages have been written by the drinker.”

  “So you’re like Faulkner and Fitzgerald and other writers who depend on the bottle.”

  “I wouldn’t say I depend on the bottle—I just like it a hell of a lot—but if it puts me in company like that, I won’t argue with you. But you’re taking yourself too seriously, Jay. Fiction is fun, and you can quote me on that, but literary criticism is bullshit.”

  “How about politics—do you have any interest in the hostage crisis or the presidential race?”

  “Not really, but I don’t like war very much, and I think Reagan’s a warmonger. I like baseball. The Braves going to do anything this year?”

  “I doubt it. Chris Chambliss might help.”

  “They need pitchers.”

  “What am I supposed to do for this article?”

  “Do you have a list of my publications, shit like that?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure it’s complete. What’s the latest, the information that might be hard for me to find.”

  “Well, just last month I sold the movie rights to Fair Game.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yes shit.”

  “Wow. Congratulations. What’s it like to be rich?”

  “I haven’t received a cent yet, so I don’t know. But I’m not expecting it to be a big deal. I guess I won’t have to buy cheap beer when I’m between books. And I won’t have to sell the house in Spartanburg if I don’t want to.”

  “Do you ever come back?”

  “Yeah, every once in a while I get a powerful urge for yeast rolls at Wade’s.”

  I laughed, but I wasn’t sure he was joking. “Call me next time you’re heading this way.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Okay. Well, I guess I’ll let you go.”

  “You got enough to get started?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “If you want, just make it all up. I give you permission to say anything you want. I mean, nobody’s going to read your little article. I bet they’re not even paying you for it, are they?”

  “No.”

  “See. If anyone was going to read it, they’d pay. I’ll tell you what to do. Say you found Oman Lare in Mexico, in a hacienda near Monterrey, where he lives with two senoritas and lots of goats, doing ‘research,’ be sure to call it ‘research,’ for his next novel. It’s called ‘Honi and the Axle of Love,’ by the way. Say we had a long discussion about contemporary literature. Say we talked about Irving and Bellow and Updike and Pynchon and Dickey and whoever.”

  “What do you think about those guys—Barth, Pynchon, Hawkes, the Weird-shitters we call them?”

  “Weird-shitters, huh?” He chuckled. “They’re all right. They play their games, I play mine.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “They play with the genre itself, I play with characters.”

  “More like Irving.”

  “Yeah, I guess—he’s my favorite of the bunch, the best storyteller by far.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “No it isn’t.”

  “What is interesting to you? What are you after?”

  “You mean besides money, fame, and women?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want to be liked and respected by my readers. Not critics or professors—no offense. I mean people who pay for books.”

  “You mind if I put that down?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Okay, what else should I say?”

  “I don’t care. Say Oman Lare belongs to the ‘fiction is fun’ school, or the ‘anything goes’ school. Hell, just make it up. Can you do it?”

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  “You do that. And if you get stuck, call me back and I’ll put the drinker on to get you rolling again.”

  “Okay. I’ll write up a draft and show it to the editor. If he says he can’t use it, I’ll call back.”

  “Sure, whatever.”

  “One more thing. Dr. Sheldon wanted me to ask if you’d be interested in coming to USC in October to give a reading. What do you think?”

  “Sure, as long as you pay. A thousand dollars plus expenses. I’d come for less as a favor to you, but don’t tell him that unless he can’t come up with a thousand.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “Here’s lookin at you Kid. Good luck with school.”

  “Thanks for your help, Oman.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Ides of March. The phone ringing in the middle of the night sounded like tragedy, and I remember the shock and fear and surreal shiver of love that came with the realization that it was Azi calling from Tehran. I hadn’t seen her since mid-December, and in the three months of her absence, during which I’d received only one letter, my feelings for her had wavered from hopeless yearning to borderline despair. Finally, I’d forced myself to accept that I’d never see her again, and I’d let that love simmer into nostalgia and affection. But here she was.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes, Jay, I sorry for to wake you. I try for to call for hours.”

  “It’s okay. I’m just glad to hear your voice.” The connection she’d finally made was clear, and I could hear her as well from 6000 miles away as I could hear my mother when she called from Spartanburg.

  “Jay, I am not to talk long time, is dangerous, but I use Sadegh phone, is safe, and he say o-kay I call you.”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “Nothing, I am o-kay.” God how I missed the way she said that two-beat word. I would always remember the sound of it in her voice—agreement, assurance, encouragement—a sound that any two people anywhere would understand, even if they had come together from the opposite poles of an erratically spinning world. “How are you?” she asked.

  “Fine, except that you’re not here, and I wish you were.” I paused, thinking of her, then Nadia, and she paused too, thinking whatever she was thinking. Rather than let the silence linger, I came up with the usual, “How’s your family?” I sat down in one of the two wooden chairs at my kitchen table, but I didn’t feel the cold on my bare legs—I was too amazed that I was on the phone with Azi. I could picture her as if she were sitting across from me at the kitchen table, sipping tea with a sugar cube in her mouth.

  She spoke briefly about her mother, who, with Azi’s support, was learning to be more independent even as the mullahs dictated otherwise for all Iranian women. And she talked about her father, who lived most of the time in an apartment he kept for the other woman, which suited Azi fine since he was such a bully and she was so mad at him. She visited her sisters and nephews and nieces often, but they were much more conservative than she—Sadegh was the only close relative with whom she could speak seriously.

  “How is Sadegh?” I asked.

  “O-kay, well, how you say—frustrated?”

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s the right word.”

  “You know Shah is in Panama.”

  “Yes.”

  “He is very sick. He need operation or he die. If he die, Sadegh say hostage problem end, hostage go free. Yes?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. Sadegh would know better than I would.”

  “He try to talk to doctor in Panama but is difficult.”

  It took my mind a minute to open those sentences and see what was inside. “You mean Sadegh wants a Panamanian doctor to kill the Shah?”

  “No kill, but no operation, so Shah die.”

  “Wow. That’s . . . that’s an interesting idea. Maybe it’ll work.”

  “Also,
they try . . . extradite, I think is word, extradite?”

  “Yes. To send him back to Iran.”

  “Yes, but Panama has law, no extradite to country where death to person.”

  “Oh. I haven’t heard about that either. I guess there still isn’t much hope then.”

  “Maybe if Shah die. Jay, you know person in Panama?”

  “What person?”

  “Person to help?”

  “Oh, no, I don’t know anyone in Panama.”

  “O-kay. Sadegh say I ask you.”

  “I wish I did. I wish I could help somehow.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “If Sadegh finds someone, or if something else works so the hostages are released, will you come back?”

  “I . . . maybe . . . no, I think no. . . .”

  “Well, I wish you could. I miss you.”

  “I miss you, Jay,” she said. “And, oh yes, the earring is beautiful. I write thank you in letter but I no know if it go to you.”

  I’d almost forgotten the gold and garnet earrings I’d found in an antique shop in Five Points—they’d cost more than I could afford, but I’d been in an idealistic, romantic state, believing in symbols and illusions, truth and beauty, the endurance of love. Three months with one letter had changed that. The letter hadn’t mentioned the earrings. “I’ve received only one letter. But I’m glad you like them.”

  “Oh, yes. And book of poems, I read all time . . .” I heard a voice in the background. “Sadegh say I go now.”

  “Okay. Thanks for calling. I love to hear your voice.”

  “Thank you. And I love to hear you. Bye Jay. I hope you write more.”

  “I will. Take care of yourself.”

  The call brought Azi back like a dream that recurred both night and day—I heard her voice and saw her face and body at odd, awkward moments, especially when I was with Nadia. I didn’t say anything to Nadia about the call and probably seemed distracted and distant to her as I struggled with my conflicted feelings. I’d had a couple of serious girlfriends in high school, and the one in college, but never two at once. And Azi and Nadia were so different, and my feelings for them were so different—it wasn’t like I could weigh them or measure them or analyze them like texts. I knew Nadia liked me in her pull-everything-out-of-her-purse-and-spread-it-on-the-table way, but what did Azi think and feel? Her voice sounded sincere, affectionate, and she said she missed me, but she’d written only one letter. Of course her circumstances were more difficult than mine, she had more serious concerns . . . she lived in fucked-up Iran. And she wasn’t going to leave.