by Iyer, Pico
When she awoke, she pushed herself deeper into him, as if to shut out the light.
“Can I get you anything?”
“Nothing’s going to bring him back.”
He smoothed her hair, sang a soft song he remembered she liked. When she awoke more fully, she was a little more herself. “Here we go again. I come to you and leave all this garbage on your doorstep.”
“I’m just happy to see you. I’d been thinking of how I’d get to see you.”
“Like you get to see a sleepless night.” The bitterness was the only part the actress had got right.
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“No. I don’t.”
She slept most of the day, and when it was dark, the small new candle burning as before (he’d gone and bought a new one after she’d taken the old one away), she said, from where she lay, “There was this call in the middle of the night. I went over, and there was an ambulance parked outside. The Browns, the Gottliebs were there. My mother was in her bed crying. I didn’t think I could ever feel sorry for her before.”
“She must be devastated.”
“She’s got his will, his safety box. That’s all she cares about.”
“But she was crying.”
“She was crying. She misses him. Now she doesn’t have anyone to use.”
“What do you feel like doing?”
“Running away, hiding. The same things I always do.” The anger came out in every direction, and it didn’t matter whom it stung; the world had done what it always did, which was to let her down.
“She wore at him and wore at him. Day after day for thirty years. Rubbing at him till there was no him left.”
“But he stayed.”
“Of course he stayed. He was too weak. She made him think she’d die if he left her on her own.”
He went into the kitchen and brought her juice. Then, settling down beside her again, “There isn’t anything you want?”
“Just take me away. Anywhere.”
They got into his car, he wrapping her up in his coat and bringing along blankets, and they drove to the ledge just beneath the once-abandoned house. Planes hovered over the town below, red lights winking on their tails, and the grids of yellow lights shivered and blurred as if ready to be snuffed out. Occasionally a car would come around the bend, and crazed shouts would pass into the mountain silence, Californian revelers off to practice whatever forms of private worship they observe outside the city walls.
“Thank you,” she said, taking long breaths and looking out the side window. “I needed this.”
“L.A. is very far away.”
“It never happened,” she said. “It doesn’t exist.”
The next day, again, she spent all the daylight hours in bed, not coming to the phone when Kristina called, not stirring in response to anything he said. She woke towards nightfall, and he asked her the same question he always asked, so she would know she was at home.
“What would feel nice?”
“Do you have some juice?”
“Juice we can do.”
She was coming back to shore at last; a little color had returned to her cheeks, and her voice had come up a few notches from the deep. But they were still walking over splintered ground; he was ready to see her wince and recoil at any moment.
“Is that all?”
“Do you have anything to read to me? I think that would feel nice.”
“What kind of thing?”
“Something from your poems. Like a year ago.”
She’d given him an opening to ask about the manuscript, and, as a kind of reassurance, he asked her nothing. Instead, he went over to the desk, where he kept the photocopies he’d made, and came back with the pieces of paper, as if they were just sheaves from the usual papers on his desk. He didn’t know yet how much she even knew of the content of the poems. When she moved up to squeeze his hand, he noticed the ring he’d given her on the wedding finger.
“Here goes. These have never been heard by human ear before. Hot off the press.”
She pressed herself into him and closed her eyes.
All night aflame,
I turn and turn.
The wind shakes my trees.
I shiver in my bed.
The world spins all around me.
Heavens fall, angels scramble at my feet.
I turn and turn,
The ground is rich with stars.
“They don’t sound like the usual ones,” she said, and he, looking down at her, couldn’t tell if it was canniness speaking, or innocence. “They don’t even sound like they’re from the same culture.”
“I can read you P. G. Wodehouse instead,” he said, not taking the bait. “S. J. Perelman or something, to make you relax.”
“No. This is nice. Go on.”
These words, my wounds, a homesickness.
A bird calls above the sea.
A light on the shore, a light.
He was trying to read her poems whose provenance he didn’t know—not the ones that were from the best-selling Rumi anthology— but whatever her response to them, he couldn’t tell: her eyes were closed and her breathing was regular.
When you left, I did, too.
No I at home any more.
Only this candle, this quiet burning.
Her body was so still, he thought she might be sleeping.
“Are you there?”
“I’m here. I’m listening.” He looked at her, and thought how the poems would have sounded even to him, two or three years ago: mystification, perhaps, empty portent.
We never move, the earth spins round.
The heavens come down, and the ground rises up.
Why talk, then, of your whirling?
It is the skies that turn, not we.
“They’re all the same,” she complained. “They all say the same thing. It’s like watching the dervishes in L.A., turning and turning again and again.”
“That’s why I hoped they’d put you to sleep.” And, for the first time in the new year, he heard her laugh. “One more, and then I’ll leave you in peace.”
Down this street, down that one,
To the center of the maze.
Nothing waits for us but silence.
“‘But silence’!” she announced, with what might almost seem delight. “That’s a Johno phrase!”
When she awoke—night had become day again, day night—she was closer still to the person he knew, and he thought she might yet be herself, so long as she was far from Los Angeles. But the life she knew looked more like an empty house than ever, her only formal and practical protector gone, her sister always off on mysterious errands, and all of her, legally, in the hands of the person she regarded as a demon. He’d thought of her life before as a small hut on the edge of the abyss; now it was as if the roof was gone, and the wind had blown away one wall, so all she could see from where she lay was empty space. She needed fortification, he thought as he watched her sleep; and when she’d been in need of someone to hold, she hadn’t gone to Greg’s house, or Kristina’s: she’d come to him.
“What would you like to do tonight?” he said as she stirred. Darkness everywhere outside and the beach was emptied out. Shouts, footsteps disappeared, and the silence took over around this time.
“Can we go somewhere?”
“Anywhere in particular?”
“You told me about your friend’s house, downtown. With a tower.”
It had been months ago, on one of their first drives, and he’d happened to mention Bill’s Victorian house near the center of town, with its aerie at the top. “It’s like a bird’s nest,” he’d said, and her face had lit up, and then he had forgotten all about it.
“Can we go there now?”
He rang up to see where Bill might be, and the answering machine was a blank: as a restorer of old sculptures, his friend was often gone for months at a time, and every now and then a call would come, from Oaxaca, or Florence, once from Siem Reap, asking
him if he could use his spare key and go into the house to find something.
They drove through the dark to the center of town, the Moorish cinema lighted up just behind them, and went in the old Victorian house through the back door. It still had an old formality—doors and divisions marked out in a nineteenth-century way, and a parlor where a lady might play the piano, a back room where an Emily Dickinson might write her poems.
He led her through the building to the stairs and then up the red carpet to the landing, filled with nothing but books. “He’s in Art History,” he explained. “It’s his idea of decoration.” Then up a much narrower set of stairs, bare wood and turns, till they came to what might have been an attic.
It was a small hexagonal room, with windows on four of its six sides. The lights of the town came in through three of them, houses on the hills, sometimes cars from the road below. Through a fourth, the pier in the distance and the sea. He turned on a light, and they were in a universe of two. “No,” she said, “it’s better without.” There was just enough light from the street to make sure they wouldn’t fall.
“It’s like a treehouse,” she said, walking round it, while he sat back. “Except more comfortable.”
“And this time you’re not alone in it.”
She stopped and sat in the middle of the room, and he left her to her thoughts, sitting against a wall. Then, after they had been silent in the dark room for some minutes, she stood up and came back to where he was sitting, and, kneeling down at his side, began kissing him all over, his lips, his neck, through the shirt she began unbuttoning.
“What is it? You don’t have to . . .”
She pulled her white dress over her head and began pulling the pins out of her hair.
“It’s all right, Camel. I’m happy to be quiet.”
She shook her hair free and looked down at him. Her face was without color, and she looked more unprotected than he’d ever seen her. She began kissing his chest, his nipples, down his stomach. He felt the tears all over her face and the cheeks wet where they grazed him: someone pretending to be her again.
She shivered as she settled herself on top of him, and then, after many moments in the silence, in the dark, she got up and picked up her dress, put it on quickly without a sound.
When they were back home, she put her things together, as if to leave.
“Is there a funeral?”
“I don’t know. I’m still in hiding.” But if she were hiding, he thought, she would surely be anywhere other than Los Angeles, and the memory of her father, her waiting mother.
“Do you need company? A bodyguard? A semi-professional escort?”
“I need nothing, thank you.” She’d already disappeared into the person she would be at the other end. “You’ve given me plenty, thank you.”
The days went slowly now that they were empty. He didn’t want to give Sefadhi more details about the new manuscript, and Alex was wary and cordial since their meeting over a common girlfriend. The book in the bank and the woman who’d come to visit were safe in their mysteries, and both of them, at some level, seemed to ask him not to ask too much.
One of the new habits he’d made in the new year was to go to the library every Monday to read the exile papers from Los Angeles: a way of keeping his Farsi up, he thought, and keeping in touch with the émigré community with which he’d begun to feel such sympathy. When he picked up the Iran Daily News, a few days after her unexpected visit, it was to see the usual black-and-white pictures of balding travel agents, and announcements of concerts featuring favorites from the old days. At the very bottom of the front page, though, there was something that caught his eyes, as if it was half familiar.
“ESTEEMED PROFESSOR DIES,” the small headline said, and its short, formulaic text read:
Professor Ferdows Azadeh was born in Shiraz in 1938. Educated at the University of Tehran, he was a professor of astronomy at the same university until his migration to the United States in 1978. Here he was a much-loved and respected member of the Westwood community known for his solemn observation of ancient Islamic custom and serious commitment to the cause of a free and democratic Iran. “He was the soul and spirit of our circle,” said Parviz Rastegar, a longtime friend and academic colleague, who worked with Professor Azadeh in many activities. “He knew the name of every star, in English, Arabic, and Persian. When he wrote poems, his friends would weep.”
Azadeh is survived by his wife, Katrina Jensen, of Los Angeles, and two daughters, Kristina, of Santa Barbara, and Camilla, of Los Angeles.
“My father’s from—somewhere else,” she’d said, that first day in the kitchen; all the tales she told were of her mother’s home, in Denmark. Physically, clearly, she was her mother’s daughter, to a fault; for all he knew, the man who seemed to have come to the U.S. a few years after her birth might not even have been her father by blood. But Kristina, he remembered, had that rich dark hair, the splashes of color, you might expect to find in the northern suburbs of Tehran. Even the casual elegance.
He went back to the first time he’d knowingly been in the same room as she was, at McCarthy’s lecture. He remembered, suddenly, her interest in the Iranian lecture, the fact she’d known how to find the dervishes. All the forgotten lore she’d sometimes pull out from her college days about Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. In the house, during the long, rainy interlude, her sudden rage when he’d spoken of Isfahan.
The white dress, he thought now: a Persian color of mourning. The body buried within twenty-four hours, as specified by the Quran, and then perhaps a eulogy at the mosque three days later, and a ceremony forty days after the death. The cards she’d brought, always from Persia; Sefadhi’s passing reference (or had it been in Seville?) to someone called “Ferdows,” connected with the poems in some way.
Even her silences became a little clearer now, all the things she couldn’t tell him, lest to do so would be to give him another confused reason to be drawn to her. She’d told him how she wanted to flee everything associated with her parents; and yet another part of her, her blood, surely propelled her towards what she knew to be her birthright. He saw her sitting alone, now, in the city that was most frightening to her; he looked at his own calendar, with its long spaces of unclaimed openness; and then, picking out a piece of paper, he began to put down something he’d been thinking of for a very long time.
Dearest Camilla,
I wish I could do something or say something that would make it all better, take you out of whatever loneliness or sadness you must be feeling now. I wish I could wave some wand or say some spell that would make it all go away. But I don’t think I can. I could tell you how it felt when my own parents went away, but every loss is particular, and I don’t think any words can really be much help. That’s one of the things I’ve learned from you.
All I can say is that I’m here if you need me, or if you’re looking for somewhere to get better. And we’ve worked so hard to build something up outside ourselves, it would be a shame— more than a shame—to let it go uncared for. It would be like locking ourselves out of our abandoned house in the hills. I know I’ve done nothing to draw you out of hiding; probably, being me, I’ve only succeeded in pushing you even farther into hiding. And I haven’t won your trust—I haven’t even earned it. I’m only just beginning to see all the things I couldn’t see before, running off in search of manuscripts when something much more valuable, more meaningful, was in my arms.
You’ll expect me now to start bombarding you with questions, about your father and Iran and all the parts of your life I never knew about before. I want to know the answers to all that as much as you’d expect. But another part of me—maybe this is your influence, too—feels that none of that would really answer anything. It would only be just another kind of diversion, more information to keep me away from what matters.
So—all, I will say is, ‘Come with me to Persia.’ Not for a long time, and not with any itinerary that’s going to sound too daunting. I can take car
e of the arrangements, the expenses (I’ve still got all that leftover money from the Fellowship); all you need do is bring yourself. It’s a trip I’ve been wanting to take for a long time, for obvious reasons, and now I can see it’s the trip you need to take, too. Now that one cycle’s ending, it’s the way to start a new one. A better one.
I know what you’re going to say to this: that I’ve really lost it now. Iran is the last place you want to go—a country run by madmen who’ve destroyed every last civility of an ancient culture. A place dangerous emotionally and in every other way, especially for someone with her roots there.
But unless we do go there, I think, we’ll always be stuck in some way; unable to move forward. If you stay where you are, you’ll never break through the patterns that you know; at least coming to Iran will make all the other places that you dream of that much closer. And if you don’t savor every moment, maybe you’ll look on L.A. a little differently when you return.
I won’t go on and on, especially at a time when you’ve got a million other things to consider, and must be feeling more vulnerable than ever. All I will say is that, if you can’t bring yourself to try this now, maybe we can find another destination, closer to home—somewhere where we can find something outside ourselves and our small concerns, the way we did in New Mexico. And if even that sounds too much, I will, though reluctantly, retreat in silence.
You know, though, whatever happens, that all I want for you is a place where you can feel safe. Your happiness is the secret of my own.
Love, truly,
John
Five days later—no answer yet—he took a greater chance, and drew out from his suitcase the card he’d brought back from Granada, of the Alhambra under moonlight.
