Those Who Knew

by Idra Novey

  For weeks after the play about his father opened at the Zodiac, he’d considered calling Lena to say he’d seen the vicious way his brother had seized her wrist. He’d wanted to tell her he had also asked about Maria P., over and over, and would have continued to ask if Victor hadn’t stopped answering his calls. He hadn’t spoken to his brother until the wedding nearly a year later, when Freddy saw his sister-in-law was already pregnant.

  The day after his nephew was born, he’d gone over and Victor had insisted he hold the baby. Everyone had joked the boy had Victor’s chin, which was the same chin as their mother. Freddy had found the baby’s squirming close-eyed innocence overwhelming. He hadn’t known what to say after Victor announced the baby’s name would be Edgar, for their uncle. Freddy felt their shared history fall over him, silent as a bedsheet. You’d better keep each other alive, their father had warned the two of them at breakfast and often again at dinner. You’ll amount to nothing if you don’t.

  When Freddy returned home after holding his nephew, he locked all of his Future Candidate scenes in a drawer.

  * * *

  Victor sat up a little taller with the pleasure of perusing so many potential slogans about himself. His new press secretary had just delivered the list.

  A SENATOR OF DECISIVE ACTION

  He liked the catchy yet serious tone of that one. And he was remarkably decisive, wasn’t he? He’d brought on this new press secretary earlier in the year and was more than pleased with her so far. She was Jewish and savvy. She wasn’t bad looking either, once he’d gotten used to the narrowness of her face. Under the slogan, she’d written a note about building on the idea by dropping in the words decisive and action during his interviews. Oh, she was definitely savvy, this Sara, and on top of that she had the relentless drive he often found among others who’d had a relative rounded up and disappeared. Sara had lost an aunt of hers. Victor couldn’t recall the aunt’s name, although it was really his business to know such things—the girl worked for him.

  Victor sucked in his gut and left his office, beyond which lay the exhilarating sight of his half-dozen employees all hunched over their keyboards, tapping away on his behalf. In the far corner, Sara was working intently, her dark curly hair twisted up into a plastic clip. He liked a girl unafraid to pull her hair back and expose her face.

  On the edge of Sara’s desk, he planted his hand and drummed his fingers against the laminate. I just wanted to come over and thank you, he said. You really nailed it: a candidate of decisive action. It’s absolutely brilliant.

  Sara lifted her face and he saw that his compliment had endowed her brown eyes with a glassy shine. Pleased with himself, he planted his other hand on the back of her chair and asked if she could join him for lunch to talk some more about the slogan. I was trying to remember the name of your aunt, he said—what was her name again?

  Exact same as mine, Sara said, with a plaintive tilt of her head. Even her last name. She was my father’s sister.

  Victor let his gut slacken and expand over the confines of his belt. I named my son for my uncle, too, he said, bearing down more weight on the back of Sara’s chair. Every time he thought of little Edgar, his whole body went soft in a way that felt insurmountable. So what do you say to lunch? he asked, bending a little closer to her face. You hungry?

  * * *

  Oscar and his wife liked to throw around the word abomination. Every time they came to this renowned uptown hospital for an ultrasound they agreed the narrow waiting room chairs on the obstetrics floor were a complete abomination. On most things, they agreed with an almost hypnotic ease. No plastic toys for their new daughter. No pacifiers or crying it out. They both wanted the baby to be in the care of a parent for at least the first six months and agreed that, financially, it made the most sense for it to be Oscar, who could resume the baking classes he taught at several schools and senior centers the following winter.

  Oscar doubted picking up a full schedule of classes again would be that simple, but he wanted to begin fatherhood right, to place his own interests last in a way he wished his father had been more willing to do. By email, his father had already postponed his trip to meet the baby because of some cruise with his girlfriend. With a sigh, Oscar picked up the copy of Get Out, the city’s nightlife and events magazine, lying on the waiting room table. Beside him, his wife was reading a pamphlet about cord blood banking, though they’d already agreed it wasn’t their sort of thing, and they couldn’t afford it anyway.

  Oscar flipped indolently through the film reviews and then skipped ahead, past the stand-up comedy pages, to the theater listings, where he stopped, his mind blaring like an ambulance at the third listing. Where He Danced While We Lay Dreaming. Beneath was the play’s name in the original language and a thumbnail-sized photograph of a man spinning with a feather boa around his neck.

  He reread the description to be certain, the blare more piercing now, and he thought maybe it wasn’t internal after all, but coming from outside the hospital, the sound carrying up from the busy avenue below.

  The blare went on pressing forward in his brain until he could feel the pressure of it against the back of his eyes. It was definitely internal. It was anguish, the blare of regret.

  Oscar dropped the magazine onto his wife’s lap to get it away from himself. I saw this play once, he tapped the listing, when I was traveling. It has tango in it. You’d probably like it.

  His wife lifted the magazine over the protrusion of her stomach and agreed she loved tango. I always forget you did that backpacking thing, she said. You never talk about it.

  Oscar agreed that was true, it didn’t come up much, did it? He leaned his head back against the wall so his wife wouldn’t see how intently he was shutting his eyes. There was no reason for her to suspect that somewhere inside him he might still be standing on a hill outside another woman’s house in another country, wondering what might have happened if they’d first slept together a week earlier, if they’d had even one extra day to work through their assumptions about each other before the shock of sitting in front of that ancient TV and watching his country being attacked. No matter how many times he went over it, he couldn’t figure out why it had felt so necessary to lash out at Lena for biting into her scone.

  He’d read much more about the island since living there, about the torture techniques his country had imparted to the island’s military. He’d skimmed endless articles online about the lack of transparency, even now, about the full role his country had played in the fraudulent vote that had put the regime in power. He’d grown chagrined at how little history he’d taken in his four semesters of college before switching to culinary school. After he met his wife, even well into their marriage, whenever he saw a mention of the island, the thought of the way he had berated Lena caused a tremor of self-loathing to quake in him.

  Around him in the waiting room now, the air felt increasingly thin and inadequate. Beside him, his wife asked if he wanted to order tickets to the play and he said yes.

  SCENES TO BE INCINERATED

  (WORK IN PROGRESS BY ANONYMOUS)

  Early in the twenty-first century.

  Country undefined.

  SET

  Downstage, a cardboard ranch house floats just above the floor.

  Upstage, a shiny question mark floats above head height.

  The question mark should shimmer notably in the stage light.

  The senator’s brother enters.

  Without acknowledging the shiny question mark,

  he comes to a stop beneath it.

  The senator’s son skips onto the stage.

  He stops beside his uncle and looks up.

  SENATOR’S SON

  Uncle, is Father sitting in a pen full of stinky pigs?

  SENATOR’S BROTHER

  Why would you ask such a thing, Nephew? What’s led you to wonder if he might be sitting in a stinky pen?
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  SENATOR’S SON

  The pigs are okay in there, right?

  SENATOR’S BROTHER

  Well, we certainly hope so, don’t we?

  SENATOR’S SON

  And why does Father have such a big, lumpy backpack on? What’s in there?

  SENATOR’S BROTHER

  What is in there, eh? Why is it so many people who go into politics end up hauling around such big, lumpy backpacks like that?

  SENATOR’S SON

  Why do you always answer with questions, Uncle?

  SENATOR’S BROTHER

  Why do you always ask me questions?

  SENATOR’S SON

  Because you always have a shiny question mark floating over your head when you come to see us.

  The brother looks up.

  He has to crane his neck to see the question mark.

  SENATOR’S BROTHER

  I guess I do, don’t I?

  * * *

  On the train to the party for Freddy, Lena tried to get through the essay she’d been assigned for Monday. The author kept referring to “the strange masks” of humanity in other cultures. She assumed the author was using the phrase ironically. Even in this most dominant of countries, she didn’t think a widely read author in the twenty-first century could still earnestly refer to the humanity of other cultures as masked and strange. Unless, perhaps, they still did.

  She turned the essay over on her lap and leaned her head against the train window behind her. On weekend afternoons, she rarely went anywhere without Cosmo, and the oddness of being in transit alone on a Saturday had slowed her thoughts down, condensing them into a heavy haze. As the train tunneled below the city, she felt wistful for the teetering diesel buses of her island. She missed the shared cabs and random intimacy of cramming into the backseat with two strangers, taking in the ocean together after every few turns in the road.

  She felt trapped traveling everywhere in this city underground, watching nothing but a smear of darkness and graffiti outside the grimy windows of the train.

  Her longing only increased when she reached the building where the party was taking place and heard one of her favorite bands from the island playing inside. The door was unlocked and Freddy’s spectacular booming laugh floated up from the back patio. The barbecue had begun at two with the idea of hanging out all afternoon before heading to the play, but Lena hadn’t wanted to leave Cosmo for that many hours in a row. She’d finally found a babysitter they both liked, a younger sister of one of her classmates. The girl had been their salvation during the weeks when Cosmo got one virus after another. Lena hadn’t been able to stay on top of her assignments. At night, Cosmo kept calling for her and vomiting on the bed. In her Friday seminar, during a discussion on the cognitive benefits of word problems, she’d had to hold her eyelids up with her thumbs to stay awake.

  As she stepped alone into the apartment, it struck her how deeply bewildering and lonely those nights had been, continually checking Cosmo’s temperature, changing his pajamas, lying awake beside him, terrified that she wasn’t doing enough. Arriving this late to the party, all the drunk, joking voices drifting up from the back patio sounded imposing and intimidating. In the first doorway, she spotted a desk chair draped with coats and purses in what looked like a home office. But once she stepped inside to leave her bag, she realized the room was much deeper than it looked from the hall and it wasn’t empty of people, as she’d assumed. At the back, there was a black futon with a woman seated on it, straddling the lap of a man who had his fingers in her hair.

  Lena apologized and started to back out of the room until the woman turned and Lena stiffened, recognizing the woman’s steady, knowing gaze immediately.

  Hey, the woman said in a murmur so low it bordered on sensual. I’m Maria, remember? I was waiting to hear from you.

  Lena opened her mouth but couldn’t think what to respond. She’d never called after meeting in the playground. Everything about the encounter had felt too fraught, though she had kept the number on her phone and continued to replay the conversation, to question whether the resemblance to Maria P. was as strong as it had felt at the time.

  I meant to call, she said, watching as Maria slowly extracted herself one leg at a time from the man’s lap. The young man got up then as well, his face difficult to make out in the unlit room. But as they both moved toward her, something about him felt potently familiar to her, too. The confidence in his gaze, his slight swagger as he drew closer. Or was it the green soccer jersey he had on from the best-known team on the island, the same jersey her brothers and all the boys she’d ever dated had worn to the games. When he leaned over to kiss her cheek, Lena leaned toward him enough to feel his stubble against her face.

  Lena and I met a little while ago, Maria said in the same low, yet forceful whisper.

  I think maybe we’ve met before, too, haven’t we? the boy said in a similarly liquid, illicit way.

  Lena wondered if they’d taken Ecstasy. When one of their hands lightly brushed her own, she twitched. It had been so long since a hand felt that electric against her palm. Startled at her own reaction, Lena didn’t look down to see which of them the fingers belonged to, whose hand briefly reached up then and brushed her hair from her face—a touch so soft and water-like that she released a sound as faint and hollowed out as the wind’s over the open mouth of a bottle.

  With Maria standing this close, with her eerily similar height and narrow face, Lena could not settle on whether this woman was an apparition or someone else entirely, who’d just happened to leave the island the same year. Lena didn’t know if her uncertainty was the cause of her stillness, or if it was the sickening lack of motion she still felt when she came across a mention of Victor, or met anyone named Maria. Or the sense of immobility that came over her when the payments arrived each month from her parents, causing her to replay the Sundays again, her grandfather defending Cato, the endless clack of the juice bottles moving tyrannically through the conveyor belts of her family’s factory—all the caught things inside her straining to be released.

  And couldn’t something at least be resolved in the silence of a small room, in the accepting of an uncertain hand in an uncertain place? By the time Maria’s lips brushed her cheek in what was a greeting or far more than that, it all felt inevitable—the dark office and their three bodies inside it, drawing closer in a country that belonged to none of them.

  * * *

  Freddy was determined not to reveal his disappointment. In the photos his friend sent of the theater she’d found for his play, the large stone building had looked like an impressive venue for a theatrical debut. His friend had never mentioned the building was on a random avenue surrounded by car washes and warehouses. He hadn’t realized until he’d arrived and come to watch the rehearsals that the building was on a soulless thoroughfare a long train ride away from the downtown theater world where he’d imagined the play would be performed.

  His friend assured him people paid attention to the shows there anyhow. She said his play had been listed in the city’s main events magazine and people would come. He knew only an ungrateful, insatiable narcissist would sulk in the entryway like this, standing apart from everyone on the opening night of his debut in this most auspicious of cities, still regretting and obsessing about the venue. And he was pleased with the actors. The translator was married to a man from the island and had done what seemed like an excellent job for next to nothing.

  Let it go, Freddy told himself. He’d had over a week to let it go, yet even now, he could not stop wishing the green tiling wasn’t so badly chipped in the entryway. The wiring backstage was as much of a tangled firetrap as at the Zodiac.

  With a sigh, Freddy clutched at his good luck scarf and wished he’d had more wine.

  He’d been too nervous to say much at all to Lena. He hadn’t seen her in the backyard until the very end of the gathering, after some irritatin
g young couple had come down and taken food and left without any interest in seeing the play. He looked around for Lena in the lobby and spotted her among some of the people from the barbecue now clustered near the ticket booth. He hoped someone who wasn’t connected to his country or related to the actors would walk in soon. It was astounding how many ways an opening night could collapse into a series of disappointments.

  As he crossed toward the ticket booth, he saw Lena’s expression abruptly change and guessed it must be in response to the anxiety on his face. He forced a more confident smile in her direction and hoped he looked less conflicted. But Lena didn’t react and Freddy realized she wasn’t responding because her gaze was on someone else, someone behind him. It occurred to him Lena might have come late after debating whether to come at all. Most likely she felt nothing for him at this point but resentment and assumed that whatever he knew about Maria he’d never betray Victor. And wasn’t she right?

  One night, as a kid, he’d heard a strange, high-pitched sound and come down to find his father drunk and weeping, slumped against the wall across from the photo that hung in the entryway of lanky ten-year-old Edgar with his arm around their father. When he told Victor the next morning, Victor admitted he’d heard the same sound another night and found their father slumped in front of the picture, too. Victor had insisted they needed to be that committed to each other as well. Even when there’s nothing left, Victor said, you can’t let go of your brother.

  * * *

  Lena watched Oscar reel back at the sight of her. She watched him clutch the arm of the pregnant woman at his side, who was such an equivalent shade of blond they looked like siblings. When Oscar finally reached her and introduced his wife, Lena nodded, waiting for him to say her name to his wife, but he didn’t. He just busied himself making an exaggerated chivalrous fuss of assisting his pregnant wife out of her coat. Underneath the coat, the wife had on a loose satin maternity shirt. The satin was a cream color, almost beige. In the cheap fluorescent lighting it took on a sheen that accentuated the curve of her profile. The expectant mother with the proud, protective father at her side.