by Salar Abdoh
There was no telling how old the house was because it was made so cheaply, it could have started to disintegrate after a year. The backyard, which Luca saw first because the front door was jammed, was as dusty and desiccated as the high-noon desert in a Western movie set. The streetlamps were blown and there was no lighting on the outside of the house, so Luca had to rely entirely on Mehdi to keep him from tripping or, he was increasingly worried, falling into a gaping fault line. Donny always said those fault lines, so ubiquitous on the landscape, were nature’s way of reminding Angelenos what imbeciles they were—to live on a part of the planet they knew was going to open up and swallow them all.
They went through a solid metal door with three separate locks that Mehdi had to open with different keys, then a wooden door fortified with metal strips and two locks, then a swinging aluminum panel with hinges that made a ghastly screeching sound as if to warn of trespassers. Mehdi stepped into the house first and tightened the bulb in a floor lamp, mumbled something about saving electricity, then switched on a second lamp.
The room was small with no windows, but it was the cleanest, most perfectly weird, ready-for-my-close-up-now, Mr. DeMille, set Luca had ever been on. The two chairs, one coffee table, end table, and bookcase were all covered with starched, gleaming-white, expensive-looking sheets. A three-foot-high stack of Persian-language magazines sat neatly against the wall. A small silver tray with a pair of clean tea glasses and a two-cup porcelain teapot was placed over the sheet, exactly at the center of the coffee table. The sheet, like all the other ones in the room, bore no mark of a human hand or body.
“Do you iron these every day?” Luca asked incredulously, but he already knew the answer.
After the disastrous visit with the medical dream team Mehdi had gathered in Tehran, Golnessa reimposed the rule of silence about her physical condition. But she also let go of her efforts to hide it from Mehdi. When they made love, she let him lead; if he fell asleep to her singing, she didn’t wake him up to go to his own room. He took over the job of feeding her, then of washing and dressing her. He did it all because he still loved her as much as ever, and because he sensed his blood run cold at the thought of her being absent from his life. Maybe, too, because she demanded it.
She didn’t have to utter the words for him to know what she wanted; he’d spent too many years striving to please her. He had never put this to the test, but he was certain that the price of displeasing Golnessa would be complete and permanent banishment; it’s what had happened to Alireza and, no doubt, the men before him. She must have planned to leave the old man from the start, but with the others she had taken a lover to replace a less-than-entirely-attentive husband.
And she had gone from each man to a younger one because, Mehdi now imagined, she realized what lay in wait for her. She had seen her mother become completely disabled and was preparing for the day when she too had to be lifted from the bed into a chair.
News was traveling faster from Europe and America, thanks in part to the dozen satellite radio and television stations that broadcast to Iran. In 1997 and ’98, two Jewish brothers in Los Angeles, physicians both and who suffered a condition similar to Golnessa’s, claimed they had identified the illness and were working hard to find a cure. They were interviewed on a few programs, and each time, they urged other patients to get in touch with them. One day, Mehdi called the radio station in LA and spoke on the air to the doctors. “We will find a cure,” the more outspoken one assured Mehdi and other listeners.
* * *
More than the hope he offered, it was the doctor’s confidence, the poise and self-assuredness with which he predicted success, that transformed Mehdi. He realized this was a largely American trait—the “can-do” attitude that was either the cause or a result of the country’s strength and prosperity. Iranians had always admired this. Most even envied Americans for it. But few, if any, believed they could own it. The world turned on a different axis in the East than in the West; the horizon was closer, more modest, not nearly as lustrous.
Yet here was this Iranian doctor, already disabled and certain to become more so, and he sounded every bit as “can-do” as Ronald Reagan telling Gorbachev what to do with his wall. If the talk on Persian-language media was to be believed, a great many Iranian exiles had achieved abroad what would have been impossible in Iran. No doubt the circumstances—a better economy, infrastructure, opportunities—could account for this. Then again, maybe confidence bred success.
Without telling Golnessa, Mehdi hired an English tutor to come to the house every afternoon during the hour of her siesta and teach him basic phrases he imagined he would need to communicate. He had heard that a person could live a full and completely connected life in LA without speaking a word of English, and that some of the best doctors in the city were Iranian-born and spoke Persian. Half the taxi drivers were Iranian too, as were shop owners, teachers, therapists, fortune tellers, scientists, and generally successful people. Even so, Mehdi thought it might be a good idea to know a few words and sentences in the language of the majority of Angelenos. He couldn’t find anyone to teach him Spanish, so he settled for the second most popular native tongue.
The English tutor, an Iranian who had been a student in Oregon when the revolution broke out, had an ex-girlfriend he was still in touch with. But for the fact that he wanted to return to Iran and take part in establishing velaayaat e faghih—Islamic government—the two would probably have married. Instead, she moved to LA, became a real estate agent, and used the few words and expressions he had taught her in Persian to draw business from the scores of refugees looking first for rental apartments, then for homes and condos to buy.
* * *
Kat Cohen, née Catherine Payne, was a Methodist-turned-Buddhist-turned-Scientologist who had converted to Judaism to marry a South African Jew. She had sold upward of three hundred houses on the West Side to Iranians, and she would be glad to help Mehdi out, rent a place for him and his wife for three months, but she felt obligated by her conscience and professional ethics to disclose what a mistake this would be on his part. To see doctors at UCLA or Cedar Sinai medical centers, you had to stay on the West Side. A semihabitable two-bedroom in Beverly Hills or Brentwood (Santa Monica was too far and too foggy; Holmby Hills was too expensive; Bel Air was fine if you wanted to get lost on your way home every single night because the streets were so entangled and the signs were useless) would cost a minimum of $12,000 a month. With a little bit of money down and a slightly longer commitment, a person could buy a house in LA for that kind of monthly payment. Then he could rent the house and keep the income, or use it as a summer home, or, who knows, be tempted to stay in LA and stop breathing the polluted air of Tehran. Kat Cohen suggested “something in a modest $6 million range.” Since Mehdi had no credit history in the US, she told him he would have to pay all cash.
He didn’t need to ask Golnessa for the money. She had seen this trip to Los Angeles coming for months. She knew he left the house for hours at a time, made secret phone calls, studied English. One night, as they lay in bed next to each other, she asked if he realized what leaving meant.
“You should know, too, that my luck doesn’t travel.”
Before Luca could stop him, Mehdi had pulled all the sheets off the furniture and, like a marine color guard, folded each one thirteen times into an “In God We Trust” triangle. He put the sheets in a box on the top shelf of the bookcase, motioned with his hand for Luca to “it’s not worthy of you but, please, make yourself at home,” and rushed into the small kitchen off the yard side of the room. Luca thought he heard the clicking of a burner on a gas stove. His phone vibrated for the umpteenth time since he had sent the last text to Donny, so he pulled it out and found a dozen voice and text messages, all demanding that he Get out NOW and warning that I’m going to call the police if I don’t hear from you in SIXTY SECONDS.
It’s all good, he texted back. This guy is crazy.
He heard a cabinet door close, so he leaned over to peer inside th
e kitchen.
“Are you making tea?”
Luca realized the question sounded more like an indictment—as in, Are you nuts enough to make tea at a time like this?—and felt terrible. Then he saw the embarrassed expression on Mehdi’s face, and was ashamed.
Yes, even at a time like this, Mehdi had not forgotten his manners, the graciousness of the Iranian host who wouldn’t dream of having a person, even a stranger, in his house without offering food and sweets and fruit or, at the very least, tea.
Mehdi was fussing with the tea leaves and pouring water from the kettle. He tore the wrapping off a box of See’s Candies that Luca thought looked suspiciously like the one he and Donny had handed out to all the help at Christmastime, put a small sugar bowl filled with clear rock candy on the tray, and picked it up.
“Please, Luca, have a seat; it’s not worthy of you, but make yourself at home.”
It wasn’t particularly hot for July, even for the Valley where temperatures were easily twenty degrees higher than on the West Side, but Luca realized he had been sweating. He went to the sink to pour cold water on his hands and let his body cool. He lifted the lever to the right, the left, straight back.
“Is this tap broken?” he called behind him at Mehdi.
There was a pause. Then Mehdi was next to him and trembling again. Without asking Luca, he grabbed a glass from a cabinet and started to pour water from a store-bought plastic container, but his hands were too unsteady. Luca noted that the sink was spotless, as if it had not been used in a while, and that there was no dish rack next to it. Instinctively, he put one knee on the ground and looked under the sink.
He wished he hadn’t stopped Donny from calling the cops.
The house on Sunset and Alpine, Kat Cohen informed Mehdi, was listed at well below market price for $8 million cash because the original owners were a Russian mob boss, his black Swedish wife, and their three children. The husband had been shot to death while taking a bath in the master bedroom, and while that was clearly a business decision, the wife had put the house on the market and moved with the children into a high-security condo on the Wilshire Corridor. But it seemed Americans had a thing about buying a house in which someone had died. By law, the owner had to disclose the death to the new buyers, which was pretty silly if you thought about it—where but in one’s house is a person supposed to die? Why would death be news to a stranger? Still, Mehdi was grateful for Americans’ fear of ghosts and other unsavory remains of living people, so he took Kat Cohen’s advice and “grabbed the dial.”
He took her advice again when she told him that in Beverly Hills, if he drove a car worth less than $50,000, he would be mistaken for the help. People would cut him off on the road and valets at high-end restaurants would refuse to park his car—and don’t even bother hoping you’ll get invited to any parties once you’re spotted getting into and out of a Camry.
He didn’t have to worry about money or even ask Golnessa for permission to spend any of it: they were in the US with visas granted to patients seeking medical treatment. To obtain the visas, Mehdi had had to present letters from doctors in Iran and in Los Angeles, as well as proof that he and Golnessa would be able to pay their medical bills. Maybe she was desperate to get better; maybe she feared that, if she didn’t go with him, Mehdi would leave alone for America. Either way, she gave him every account number and, once in LA, had the money transferred from New York and made Mehdi signatory.
He bought a Mercedes S-Class for $80,000. On a referral from Kat, he hired a decorator she was happy to recommend, and a husband-and-wife Filipino couple she was also happy to recommend. For $1,000 a week, the husband did the heavy lifting and food shopping and the wife cooked and cared for Golnessa. Only then did Mehdi wade into the quicksand of the medical system without health insurance.
The doctors at Cedars examined Golnessa and announced she had advanced hereditary inclusion body myopathy (HIBM)—a rare genetic muscle-wasting disorder with no cure and, so far, no treatment. Thanks to the two physician brothers and families of other patients, a cure was being aggressively pursued, and it would probably be found, as one can-do brother had promised, in his lifetime. But he was in his early forties; Golnessa was seventy-one.
She had submitted to the examination, the blood tests and MRIs and every invasive procedure, with an eerie calm that worried even Mehdi. She didn’t understand English and wasn’t interested in speaking in Persian with the Iranian doctors or the interpreters provided by the center. Her hands were completely disabled now but her organs remained unaffected and her voice was strong. Until Mehdi corrected it, the doctors were under the impression that she was his mother. Afterward, they assumed he was a kept man. They thought she should be approached to make a donation to the search for a cure, if not for herself then perhaps for her children or grandchildren who may be affected and not even know it yet. Who else but a very rich widow with throngs of progeny far away in the home country just waiting for her to die would snare a young, good-looking man nearly half her age? So they called the medical center’s “development” staff who called their regular Iranian donors. Did others in the community know Golnessa Hakeem? the development people wanted to know. Was it safe to assume she should be “cultivated,” possibly for estate planning? Could the regular donors be counted on to act as intermediaries? Suddenly, the phone in the Hakeem house started to ring.
Mehdi didn’t know any of the callers but they seemed to know him and Golnessa. They knew his siblings too, and were happy to bring him up to date. And though they clearly remembered Alireza and Davood, and knew how Mehdi had ended up with Golnessa, they didn’t seem to hold it against him.
Things had changed a great deal among Iranians in the West since the revolution. Memories were shorter; people had a higher tolerance for bad behavior. A person or a family’s social status did not depend as much on their pedigree and good name as it had in Iran. Here, it was mostly about how much money you were thought to have. Compared to what went on every day in LA, the history that had made Golnessa a social pariah most of her life didn’t seem as outrageous. Compared to the crimes committed during and after the revolution, Mehdi’s virtual patricide was not an unforgivable sin.
There were parties on the West Side five nights or more a week, and before long Mehdi was invited to all of them. The Jews, who knew Golnessa was Jewish, assumed Mehdi was too. The Muslims, who had heard of Alireza, assumed he was one of them. For a while when they called, they invited “you and khanum”—the Mrs.—but he always went alone and they stopped mentioning the wife. He was still a good-looking man. The shyness that, had he been poor, would have explained “why he’s such a loser,” was deemed genteel and classy because he was rich. The fact that he showed up to parties without his wife, which would have meant he was “a disloyal, cruel, and dastardly ass” if he was poor, was a sign of his moral courage for subjecting himself to loneliness while he cared for an invalid spouse. He could have left her in Iran, or committed her to a government-funded home in LA. He could have taken another wife and had children while there was still time, enjoyed his money. They didn’t just say this to each other about Mehdi; they told him too.
He had no idea how to interpret this sudden shift in his social standing. He was having enough trouble keeping track of the callers’ names and their explanations of how he was related to them. The first time someone invited him to their house he nearly gagged in terror. When they insisted, he said what sprang to mind: “I’m not sophisticated and I wouldn’t know what to wear.” But the invitations kept coming and the Iranians on the boards of charities and the development people from the medical centers and various city organizations in Beverly Hills kept insisting that he was fine “as is. No need to wear anything special and you’ll be among friends, we’re all down-to-earth here.”
That last claim wasn’t true. When he did, at last, venture out for an hour, one night after he had sat with Golnessa while the Filipina woman fed her in bed, Mehdi was spellbound by the elegance and exc
ess he saw at the gathering. The house was palatial and tastefully furnished, the women lean and elegant and mostly blond. There was enough food and music and flowers and alcohol to keep a shipload of sailors happy for a year on a deserted island. It was all so intimidating, Mehdi lingered against a wall for ten minutes, then rushed to get his car before the valet had had a chance to park it.
But he had been initiated, and after that it only became easier.
He didn’t like to leave Golnessa alone with the help, because she didn’t speak English and hardly let them touch her. Almost entirely immobilized, she had to be moved in bed or on the chair every three hours to prevent sores. This wasn’t difficult, since she weighed barely eighty pounds and kept losing more weight. Mehdi cooked all her favorite meals and taught the Filipina as well, but it was no use, she ate like a small child and never seemed to enjoy it. She had the ability to speak but not, he sensed, the will. He knew that she was angry at him for bringing her to LA, that she felt betrayed by him, but unlike in the past when he wouldn’t dare question her feelings, he told himself it made no difference to Golnessa what country they lived in—a bed was a bed anywhere, and the view from her window, while not as striking as the views in Darband, was rather idyllic. And he hadn’t abandoned her here; he hardly left the house during the day and went out to parties only at night when she should have been sleeping. He still sat with her for hours at a time, just holding her hand and caressing her hair, running his finger along the length of her eyebrows and to her temples, down the bridge of her nose, onto her mouth, the way she used to like. Because she wouldn’t sing to him, he sang to her:
Sabbab gar besoozad, Mossabeb tow has-ti,
Sabbab kaar eh in jahan tow-ee . . .
Slowly, he began to take meetings during the day. Then there were lunches and dinners hosted by solicitous volunteers, Shabbat dinners, birthdays, and graduations, and, counting American, Iranian, Muslim, and Jewish holidays, something to celebrate every other week. It was strange, Mehdi thought, how he was getting acquainted with his own people for the first time in his late forties. Those others he had known in Iran—the working-class families, the villagers who had migrated to the capital in search of jobs, the street urchins who, like him, worked twelve-hour days peddling chewing gum and cigarettes and, in the hours-long traffic jams of Tehran, washing car windows for whatever the driver threw at them—they had become strange and foreign to him during the two decades of self-imposed confinement in Darband. He had money then, but no way to use it beyond the necessities. The Iranians he was meeting in LA were friendly and hospitable and generous to a fault. They rarely brought up his relationship with Golnessa, and when they did, it was to say they realized he was a victim—a young boy chiz-khored by a “charming” stepmother.
