Hum: Stories

by Richmond, Michelle

  “Very pretty,” I say. I know my husband agrees, though he would never admit it. He is gentle in that way. We’ve been married for almost ten years, and he is still able to pretend I’m the most attractive woman in any room.

  “Do you hire her services often?”

  “Once a month.” V. turns around in his seat and winks. “No happy ending, though, if you know what I mean.”

  The driver slams on the brakes to avoid a man in a red coat and pants who has appeared in the middle of the road in front of us, juggling bricks. Naturally, the juggler isn’t doing a very good job of it. Those can’t be bricks, I’m thinking, but yes, they are. V. hands the man a coin, and the car lurches forward. I imagine that by the time we reach the next intersection, the coin will have already declined in value, its purchase power reduced from a loaf of bread to half a loaf. We arrived just as the economy is imploding; in the streets one can sense not so much panic as a kind of bracing for the storm.

  From the moment we arrived, everything has happened very quickly and in a language we don’t understand. Earlier today, V. met us at the airport with a hired car and took us to his spacious apartment to drop off our things. We were drained from the seventeen hour flight, both of us stunned by the unfathomable news I had delivered to my husband this morning. Still, V. refused to let us sleep. “The city looks better in daylight,” he said. “We must see it now.”

  “While seeing the city,” he added, “there is a small errand in which I will need your help, the matter of the plants. The veritable jungle in my apartment has gone to ruin during my recent travels in the interior, so I need to purchase replacements.” The plants we now hold in our laps are much beloved for their medicinal properties. The needles of the cactus can be boiled to relieve stress, and the leaves of the plant my husband holds can be crushed and steeped for digestive purposes. The latter is said to bear beautiful red flowers, but it hasn’t blossomed yet, and the rough, brownish leaves give off a bitter smell.

  Our journey will end at the harbor at dusk, where we will meet V.’s most recent lady friend, Sylvana. I am not looking forward to meeting her. Over the years, in the various countries where V. has been posted, he has introduced us to a number of women, each of whom seems a bit less friendly than the one before.

  To this day, we do not really know what V. does for a living. The words information and education are often used when his work comes up, though we’ve never gotten a clear idea whom he is educating, concerning what. In the time we’ve known him, he has held five different postings. The walls of each office are covered with plaques from various embassies thanking him for his excellent service. The size and luxury of his housing is evidence of the fact that he is in good standing with the U.S. government. Yet each posting is more obscure than the last, and somehow more desperate. He began in Stockholm and ended here, in a place that never makes the news, a capital that surely not even one American schoolchild could name, a country so small and unknown that no guidebook has been written about it.

  “Why here?” we say each time we arrive at his new posting, lured by V.’s promises of great food and offbeat adventures.

  “I’m looking for something I’ve never seen before,” he says. In each new country, we end up at some rowdy party populated by North American expats half his age—artist types and acrobats, people living off trust funds or the proceeds from roadside jewelry stands. The parties always leave me feeling a bit queasy. I can’t help but wonder what basic characteristic my husband and I share with the other guests.

  ***

  We began our taxi ride this afternoon on the inland edge of the Boulevard of Heroes, a wide, straight thoroughfare that runs the width of the city from the airport to the harbor. Each major road intersecting the boulevard is named for a national figure. There are, of course, the usual suspects, noble men and women who briefly freed the people from the tyranny of various interlopers—Spaniards, Portuguese, and the much-loathed Canadians, whose dealings with this country have been uncharacteristically cruel. There are streets named after poets and philosophers, one for an opera singer of great beauty, another for a painter whose abstract and whimsically colored visions of his country, painted on enormous sheets of corrugated tin, hang in the halls of important palaces and museums throughout the world. But there are also streets named after inventors of odd things—such as the man who created the fragrance for school glue—and a street devoted to a self-declared prince who was the pretender to the throne of England. Traversing the Boulevard of Heroes, one has the feeling of traveling through a fairy tale, a proud nation’s fictionalized version of itself.

  “Are you doing all right with those plants?” V. asks now, in a voice that seems unnaturally cheerful.

  “Lovely,” I say. V. doesn’t seem to hear me. He keeps looking anxiously at my husband, waiting for a response.

  “Oh, we’re fine back here,” my husband says. But I can see that he’s breaking out in a rash, splotchy red patches emerging on his neck and hands. When we first met, he was immune to everything, but over the years he has become increasingly allergic, and we never know what might set him off.

  “You okay?” I whisper, catching his eye.

  He nods, reaching over to squeeze my hand. On this particular afternoon, nothing can get him down. I just told him the news early this morning, as our plane flew over a vast topography of white-capped mountains, from the darkness of the Northern Hemisphere into brilliant daylight: he’s going to be a father.

  ***

  The light turns yellow just as we’re approaching Anna Menendez Avenue.

  “Who was Anna Menendez?” I ask.

  “A martyr in the revolution,” V. explains.

  “Which revolution?”

  “That’s cause for speculation. Some say it was the People’s Revolt of 1887, others claim it was the Seamstress Rebellion of 1929. It seems there was an Anna Menendez involved in both events, although it’s unclear whether the two Annas were related—or perhaps even the same person. There are others who claim that Anna Menendez never existed, that it was simply the pen name of a housewife who composed, at great risk to her life, several pamphlets criticizing the government.”

  “A mystery,” my husband says.

  “Yes, it’s part of the charm of this country. Day to day, in matters ranging from the price of a quart of milk to historical facts, it’s impossible to unravel any definitive truth.”

  Just as the light switches from yellow to red, a group of schoolchildren appears and begins to cross the street in a great display of disorder, pitching forward against the wind. The children are sporting a uniform consisting of a thin white lab coat over blue jeans, with bright yellow shoes. Around the necks of their lab coats they wear a big piece of red fabric, tied in a floppy bow. Most of the children look a bit stunned, as if they were rudely awakened from their naps, but I imagine that is merely the effect of the cold. They are uncommonly beautiful children, with wide eyes, high cheekbones, and glossy hair.

  It looks as though they’re on some kind of Red Cross field trip, or an amusing jaunt from science class, judging by the outfits. V. explains that the national uniform was designed by the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Ministry of Education. The Minister, a widower whose interest in education stems mainly from an exaggerated devotion to his only child, made a statement on national television in which he claimed that the uniforms would not only unify the school children, but would also present a positive image abroad.

  “I cannot imagine for my own daughter, or for the daughters and sons of this country, a calling higher than physician or actor,” the Prime Minister is rumored to have said, although V. notes that he did not actually see the broadcast himself.

  “It’s entirely possible,” he says, “that I heard a faulty translation.”

  ***

  Three years after our first trip to Sweden, my husband traveled there again on business. I took a few days off from the hospital where I work and accompanied him. The conference he was attending was
only an hour’s drive from the town where we first met V. We decided to stay in the same hotel, in the valley beside the very blue lake. It was a strange decision, but looking back, I begin to understand it. I think the deep-seated Catholicism of our childhood took hold, and we gave into superstition. We thought we had done something wrong the first time around, and that by returning to the exact place of our original failing we might make amends.

  We were in the hotel for a week. We made love six nights in a row, although the terminology is perhaps inconsistent with the act. I wore new lingerie, he was extensive in his foreplay, and yet there was a feeling of labor about the whole thing. We’d both lost that old craving for one another’s bodies. The thing we desired was a baby; we were no longer lovers, merely collaborators, like business partners who share the same goal. On the seventh day, after lunch, drunk on three martinis, I faked an orgasm for the very first time. He didn’t even bother to fake one, he simply rolled off of me in the middle of things.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “Why didn’t you finish?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to.”

  He was looking at the ceiling. He’d begun to go a little gray. “It’s all become so clinical.”

  That afternoon I sat alone in the solarium, which was flanked by high glass walls overlooking the lake. Several heaters were going, and it was uncomfortably warm. Against the back wall there was a sign that said “Health Bar.” Behind the glass bar was a single basket of fruit and a vast array of hard liquors. I wore a new black one-piece I had ordered from a catalogue. It fit badly, and I felt self-conscious in it. I had read in a magazine somewhere that dieting decreases one’s chance of getting pregnant, that being slightly overweight may actually increase the odds. As a result, I was plump for the first time in my life. I looked down and saw a body not my own, pale and bloated, somewhat like my mother’s had become in the years before she died.

  Once again, as on our first trip to Sweden, the mountains in the distance were white-capped, so picturesque as to look fake. One of the pools was half in and half out of the solarium, and there was another heated pool outside, covered with a blue tarp. Earlier in the day it had been snowing, but now it rained. Rain pelted the tarp, and steam rose up from the gaps. Mist moved across the mountains in the distance. Rain dropped from one of the indoor eaves into a small rock garden. For a while it was very quiet, and I was alone save for the bartender. Then he came out from behind the bar to turn on the jets in the hot tub, and their mechanical gurgling sound was added to the rain. I caught him glancing at my legs, and, feeling ashamed of their new heft, I covered them with my robe. I was aware of the irony—my new weight made me look somewhat maternal, asexual, like a busy mother who had let herself go.

  The rain picked up. Another staff member appeared and began folding towels. A couple of minutes later another one came to light the candles around the pool. They talked among themselves and kept glancing over at me, lying mute by the pool like an overfed fish. I had the uncomfortable feeling of being at the center of a great commotion of which I was not a part.

  ***

  “You must be my eyes and ears,” V. says, turning around in his seat. “When we meet Sylvana, you must watch her body language closely and listen carefully to her intonations.”

  He is addressing my husband, not me. It has always been clear that V. cares for my husband more than he does for me, that his jokes are calculated to make my husband laugh, his stories designed to pique my husband’s curiosity. I have been, from the beginning, little more than a prop on the stage, an inexplicable yet somehow necessary element in the slowly evolving drama of their friendship. Without my ongoing presence, I doubt they could have become friends; it would seem almost improper in a way I can’t quite explain.

  “What am I looking for?” my husband says, moving his plant slightly to the side. The rash is slowly creeping up his neck, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  “For her intentions. I’ve always been inept at judging the motives of women. I don’t know if Sylvana is attracted to me, or if she merely views me as a friend. Does she genuinely enjoy my company, or does she simply tolerate me because she believes I hold a position of power? I hope it’s the former, because I like her very much. I’m past fifty, you know. I can’t be a bachelor forever.”

  V. sighs. It’s a terribly sad sigh, one I’ve become familiar with over the years. We’ll be having a perfectly innocuous conversation, and suddenly V. will retreat into melancholy. My husband and I have never figured out what exactly triggers these fleeting bouts of depression. We know only that V. has some secret in his past to which he occasionally alludes. “I’ve known tragedy in my life,” he said once, during a long, starchy dinner at an empty restaurant in Tirane, Albania. I wanted to ask him to be more specific, but then the chef came out with half a carafe of wine and a basket containing three pieces of hard bread.

  “Our best,” the chef said, placing the basket in front of V. with a great show of ceremony. It was just a couple of years after the revolution, and everything was hard to come by in Tirane: flour, salt, fabric, electronic goods. As the chef stood by in his impeccable white jacket and white hat, waiting for V. to give his approval, we all sat staring at the meager offering of bread, trying to hide our mutual embarrassment.

  “Thank you, Leni,” V. said. “It looks delicious.”

  The spell was broken, and in our room that night, a large suite on the sixth floor of an utterly deserted hotel, my husband and I speculated as to the nature of the tragedy. Speculation was all it amounted to, though. V. had a way of getting us to talk in great detail about our lives without ever revealing much about himself. We had known him for four years, we considered him one of our closest friends, yet in some ways his essential character was as unknown to us as a stranger at a dinner party. That night in Tirane, as a matter of course, my husband and I engaged in an unusually acrobatic bout of lovemaking. In the middle of our exertions we were interrupted by the loud jingling of a bell and the shouts of a man standing directly below our window.

  “Hello, American tourists!” the man shouted several times, until finally my husband wrapped a towel around his waist and went to the window.

  “What?”

  “Here for you I have Albania’s most glorious ice cream!”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Yes, but later, I will be here, and you will come down for ice cream.”

  At two a.m., after my husband had fallen asleep, I went to the window and saw that the man was still there, waiting patiently by his cart. “You are ready for ice cream now!” he said—not a question, but a statement of fact.

  I pulled on jeans and a sweater and went down to the dark street, where I bought two cups of pale yellow ice cream that was frozen so hard it was inedible. I left the ice cream on the windowsill that night, and by the morning it had thawed to a creamy slush. We had it for breakfast and were surprised to discover that it was quite good, if not very sweet. It reminded me of the ice cream that was served at Vacation Bible School when I was a child, which was always slightly tainted with the taste of the wooden spoon.

  ***

  After a few minutes of driving in silence, V. says something to the driver. V. is a chameleon of language, able to learn a new vocabulary and accompanying set of dialects with astonishing speed. The car comes to a halt. “I wanted you to see Phelan Avenue,” V. says, waving his hand to indicate a narrow, tree-lined road intersecting the Boulevard of Heroes. The trees have enormous trunks and big limbs draped with moss. They remind me of my childhood home, of summers in the American South.

  “Named for?”

  “Kevin Phelan, a great translator who is single-handedly responsible for saving the works of Ivan Martinez from certain obscurity.”

  “The Ivan Martinez?” my husband says. “Author of The Dockside Trilogy?”

  “Exactly.”

  While I was still a sophomore in high school and my husband was studying film at UCLA, years before our pa
ths crossed, he took a graduate seminar devoted to Martinez. The author died at 34 of an unexplained trauma to the head, leaving behind a single book. The novel was required reading for college English majors all over the country for a brief time in the eighties; now, however, The Dockside Trilogy has been out of fashion for several years.

  “Every copy I’ve seen of the novel contains the line, Translated by anonymous,” my husband says.

  “Two weeks after completing the translation,” V. says, “Phelan dropped dead of a heart attack. His wife never allowed Phelan’s name to be associated with the manuscript. She found Martinez’s work to be morally objectionable.”

  “On account of the sex?” I ask.

  “Apparently the book had a few too many happy endings for Mrs. Phelan.” V. glances around to make sure we got the joke.

  “Ha,” my husband says. He manages to say it without sounding insincere. This is his greatest gift—an almost ridiculous capacity for sincerity.

  I do remember a particularly exuberant sex scene in The Dockside Trilogy, which takes place in the hold of a tiny boat tied to the docks during a hurricane. I was never able to figure out the logistics of the scene—how the couple manages to do what they do while the wind wails around them at ninety miles per hour—but I remember being impressed by Martinez’s knowledge of female anatomy, his ability to make the whole thing seem both inspired and sordid at the same time. Not long ago, I read the scene aloud to my husband. The reading had the desired effect, and we spent the better part of one November weekend in bed together. The following Monday, I looked out our bedroom window at a mailbox wobbling in the wind, the driveway littered with orange leaves, and I realized that our passion was a thing unto itself, a reason to celebrate. For years we had held out the hope that it would lead to something more, something grand, nothing short of a life. But our love was worth something in and of itself, was it not? It was an accomplishment, a testament to that first spark: our love, through the years, had changed but not died. It had grown bigger, more complicated, more necessary. There comes a time when what started as a possibility, a hope, becomes both a reality and a given. An essential part of one’s existence. We had long ago reached that point. I realized, then: I could live without a baby, but I could not live without him.