My New American Life

by Francine Prose

  Crossing the restaurant, Lula turned a few heads and was glad, for Don and Mister Stanley’s sake. They deserved to have dinner with someone who made other men momentarily forget what they were saying.

  Don gathered Mister Stanley and Zeke in one exuberant hug. In his office, Don greeted Lula with a formal handshake, but tonight he stood on his toes to kiss her cheek. This was a celebration! Don’s round bald head and belly reminded Lula of a bowling pin for giants. Don had many qualities—intelligence, kindness, generosity, power—that women found attractive. Lula wished she were one of those women, instead of the kind who was drawn to the sort of guy who asked you to keep a gun for him and didn’t let you ask why.

  Peering around Don, Lula saw a child’s head on a platter. Don’s daughter had rested her head on her plate to express how depleted she was by the boredom of watching her stupid father welcome his stupid friends.

  “Hi, Abigail,” said Zeke.

  Abigail thrust out her tiny pink tongue and licked the empty plate.

  “Abigail!” said Don Settebello. “Be polite, please!”

  “Nice to see you,” Abigail droned.

  Don and Mister Stanley dropped back as Lula and Zeke approached the table. Lula heard her lawyer tell her boss, “Betsy must think I’m stupid enough to believe that people get last-minute opera tickets on Saturday night. She loves to wait until it’s too late to get a babysitter so I can’t go out and commit all the chauvinist-pig misdemeanors she thinks I’ve been waiting to do all week. Heinous macho crimes against the female gender, which I obviously can’t perpetrate if I have Abigail with me.”

  “At least Betsy calls you,” said Mister Stanley. “Unlike Ginger.” Hadn’t he just said in the car that Ginger had phoned? Lula sensed competition over whose estranged wife was more exasperating. Mister Stanley admired Don, but they’d grown up like brothers, and there was an edge of brotherly rivalry, an odd note that crept into Mister Stanley’s voice when he worried out loud about Don pushing his luck in choosing to fight Washington with every case he took on. It wasn’t clear, exactly, what he feared might happen to Don, though several times he’d mentioned how shocking it was to think that his friend might be made to suffer for having a conscience and speaking out.

  “How shall we arrange ourselves?” Don asked. Abigail wasn’t budging from the center of the banquette. Zeke slid in beside her, Don sat on her other side, Mister Stanley beside him. Lula was exiled to the end, celebrating her party from the far edge of the children’s section. Even though they liked Lula, the men would rather talk to each other.

  “Of course you win,” Don told Mister Stanley. “Ginger has always taken the cake.” Lula couldn’t ask what Don meant by “the cake” with Zeke and Abigail listening.

  Lula had promised herself not to drink much, no matter how good the wine was. The watery mojitos had probably lowered her tolerance to the point at which she might say something that made no sense, or more sense than she wanted. But the seating arrangement was making her ill-tempered and reckless. Put her at the children’s table, and she’d be the baddest child. When the waiter appeared with the wine, Lula beamed up at him and mimed upending the bottle into her glass. Unamused, he filled it to the precise level he’d learned in red-wine training. La Changita had a rum sommelier, a conga player whose English was so bad he could fake knowing one rum from another.

  “To Lula and her new American life!” said Don, and all except Abigail raised their glasses.

  “To peace in our time,” said Mister Stanley.

  “Amen!” said Don. “To bringing the troops home from Iraq!”

  “That’s not going to happen,” said Lula.

  “To our little Albanian pessimist,” said Mister Stanley.

  “Realist,” muttered Zeke.

  “G’zoor,” said Lula.

  “G’zoor,” said Mister Stanley and Don.

  “To whatever,” toasted Zeke. He was bringing his water glass to his lips when Lula grabbed his arm.

  “It’s bad luck to toast with water!”

  “What am I supposed to do now?” asked Zeke, horrified by the attention.

  Lula pinked Zeke’s water with a few drops of wine, ignoring Mister Stanley’s dirty look. Two drops. Why couldn’t he be charmed, as always, by her quaint Old World customs, instead of worried that he was paying her to turn his son into an alcoholic? Then Mister Stanley remembered—European!—and relaxed back in his seat.

  “I already took a sip of water,” said Zeke. “Does that count?” Zeke stared into his water glass as if he was watching bad luck rise from it like a genie.

  “One sip doesn’t count,” said Lula, wishing it were true.

  Lula’s first mouthful of wine tasted like drinking velvet or pipe smoke or liquefied brocade. A cascade of flavors brightened the future enough that, if she didn’t feel happy yet, she could imagine feeling happy before the night was over. To speed along the process, she drained her glass and signaled the waiter to refill it. Only a few times in her life had she drunk wine this good, always when a table at La Changita ordered from the top of the list and then got so blasted they left half the bottle, which Lula hid so that she and Dunia and Luis and Franco could finish the two-hundred-dollar Amarone.

  “Jesus,” said Don Settebello. “Speaking of bad luck. One of my clients, Salvadoran guy, he’s just got his green card, the guy was a journalist back home and now he’s got a job with CNN, he’s on his way to sign his contract, crossing Broadway and Fifty-first, a taxi jumps the curb, the driver’s first day on the job, the fucking stupid moron—excuse me, kids—runs over my client’s foot.”

  “Nightmare!” said Mister Stanley. “That’s why defensive driving is so critical, Zeke. The streets are swarming with nut jobs.”

  “Wait. It gets worse,” said Don. “The guy’s foot is smashed, they operate on him for hours, chewing-gum and duct-tape everything together, good as new, or practically. They’re writing him a scrip for physical therapy when somebody notices he has no health insurance, and they deport him because no facility will take him.”

  “Deport him deport him?” said Mister Stanley.

  “From the country,” said Don.

  “Can they do that?” asked Lula.

  Don shrugged. “My dear, we all know goddamn well they can do anything they goddamn want.”

  “So where is he now?” asked Mister Stanley.

  “Juarez, for all I know. They dump the poor bastards over the border. All my e-mails keep bouncing back, which is never a good sign.”

  Lula felt as if her wine had been replaced with some icy acidic punch. Instantly sober, she said, “I have this friend—”

  “Health insurance,” said Mister Stanley. “Who would bother working otherwise?”

  “You would, Stan,” Don said. “And you know why? Because you’re the only guy in America still waiting for Wall Street to keep its promise. How long has it been now?”

  “Twelve years,” Mister Stanley said glumly.

  “How time flies!” said Don. “Bill Clinton’s first year in office, Good Guy Stan lets himself be lured down from his ivory tower by these headhunters—don’t you love that expression?—who claim they’re about to start a new program, a socially conscious Grameen-bank kind of thing, small loans to small businesses. Help the little guy. Good deeds and good money. Who could resist? Except that the good deeds part never happened, as I remember warning you. Remember what I said? I said, Lie down with the big dogs and you get up with the big fleas—in a corner office! So now you get to foreclose on the same little guys you thought you were going to help, and even now, even now some part of you still believes that things will turn around and you’ll get to do some—”

  “Badgering the witness!” Mister Stanley said.

  “Lula,” said Don. “Did Stan ever tell you that the young guys in his office call him the Professor? Did he ever tell you how when we were kids back in Rockaway, the neighborhood bully offered Stan ten bucks, a fortune back then, to steal a beer from the corne
r store? Stan did it, not so much for the money itself, which trust me his family needed, but because he believed the kid would pay him. Even then Mr. Big Heart thought that people did what they promised. So of course he got caught and his poor dad had to go in and apologize and pay off the owner not to call the cops and—”

  “Dad, you stole a beer?” said Zeke. “That is totally cool.”

  “I was eight,” Mister Stanley said. “Half your age. A child. I didn’t know any better. Tell Lula what you did, Don.”

  “I tracked down the little bastard bully and beat the crap out of him. From there it was a hop skip and jump to the DA’s office, until I got fed up with persecuting the poor and deporting the innocent. My point is, it’s never too late to come over, or back, to the side of the angels.”

  “You would too, Don,” said Mister Stanley, his pale cheeks pinking with every gulp of wine.

  “Would what?” said Don.

  “Keep working if it weren’t for health insurance. Because you can actually do some good. You’re helping people. Like Lula.”

  “G’zoor to that,” Lula said. She toasted the air and drained her glass. It was semi-interesting, what Don had said about Mister Stanley, but her attention had been hijacked by Don’s client with the broken foot. She hated stories about how if you’d only stopped to pick up that piece of trash or ordered that second cup of coffee, if your Metrocard hadn’t failed to swipe, your whole life would have been different. She also hated stories about people being deported and stories about car wrecks. Lula would ask them about Dunia. They would know what to do.

  “On second thought,” said Mister Stanley. “I’m not so sure I would keep working without the coverage. Every day I ask myself why I get up in the dark before dawn and drive through the filthy smelly tunnel—for what? To transfer money from one pocket to another? Other people’s pockets. And it’s all going into the same pocket. Okay, the same five hundred pockets. What if I quit tomorrow? Whose life would it change but mine? Not the guys we turn down for loans, not the families—”

  “Hear, hear,” said Don Settebello. “My old friend Stanley discovers the pimply fat face of capitalism.”

  “The main thing that will change if you quit,” said Zeke, “is that you won’t be able to pay for my college.”

  “That won’t change,” said Mister Stanley. Then he put his head in his hands.

  Don signaled the waiter for another bottle.

  Lula said, “Something like that happened when I worked at the restaurant. There was this busboy, Eduardo . . . and I have this friend, Dunia.”

  The waiter loomed over Don’s shoulder. “Ready to order, sir?”

  “If we had menus,” Don said.

  The waiter stomped off and returned with a stack of leather-bound tomes. None of the entrees were under forty-five dollars. A hamburger was thirty, but Lula would feel embarrassed ordering a burger here. A plate of home fries—fifteen bucks! Lula knew that the waitstaff had nothing to do with the pricing. Even so, she felt as if they were conspiring to relieve Don of the maximum amount of his hard-earned cash. How odd to find herself on the customers’ side of one of those undeclared wars that sometimes broke out between customers and waiters.

  Mister Stanley said, “I’ll have the rib eye.”

  “Me too,” said Zeke.

  “Make that three,” said Lula.

  “The porterhouse,” Don said. “And I want to hear mine moo.”

  A wail went up from Abigail. “What about me? Isn’t anyone taking my order? Am I not here?”

  “What would you like, honey?” Don said. “Order anything you like.”

  “You know I’m a vegetarian. Dad, why did we even come here?”

  “We have a very fresh swordfish tonight,” the waiter said.

  “Is swordfish a vegetable?” Abigail demanded. “Dad, is swordfish a vegetable? Does it have a face or a central nervous system? Because I’d really like to know if it has a face or a central nervous system.”

  Lula glanced at Zeke, who seemed delighted by Abigail’s courage. Lula sent him a telepathic message. Don’t be fooled. You can count on a vegetarian to eat little boys like you for breakfast.

  “I’ll have the creamed spinach,” Abigail said.

  “That’s all?” Don gave Mister Stanley a searching look, asking for a ruling on whether Abigail was just messing with his head or if she’d developed a full-blown eating disorder. Mister Stanley shrugged. What did he know about girls?

  “Appetizers?” said the waiter. “Sides?”

  Defeated by his daughter, Don surrendered to the waiter. He said, “We’re in your hands.” Lula wanted to cry out, No!

  “We’ll bring some appetizers and sides,” said the waiter, ignoring Lula’s furious stare. Ka-ching, she thought. Ka-ching.

  Don said, “What’s up with that bottle we ordered? Sooner rather than later.”

  Mister Stanley put his hand over his glass. “I’m fine. I have to drive the family back to New Jersey.”

  The family? Lula was family? Sweet dear Mister Stanley!

  “What about you, Lula?” said Don. “I’m not drinking alone, am I?”

  Lula raised one eyebrow and nodded. Deal me in.

  Don’s smile conveyed a loopy familiarity, as if he and Lula had agreed to embark on some joint project. In Lula’s experience, the end of that particular project—drinking—was usually sex, but she couldn’t tell if that was what was on Don’s mind. She’d known it was on Franco’s mind, that night when, after La Changita closed, he stood behind her chair and pressed his groin into her back. What a gentleman! How did guys like Don Settebello signal erotic interest? Probably just like other guys, but Lula wasn’t sure. Besides which, he was her lawyer. If they had sex, a principled fellow like Don would feel he had to recuse himself from her green card application, which would make having sex with Don a lose-lose situation. Unwelcome thoughts of Alvo crowded into her mind. Or maybe not so unwelcome. Lula picked up her glass and resumed her progress along the road to tipsy well-being.

  A convoy of waiters closed in on them, thumping down shrimp cocktails, wooden boards draped with pâté and cured meats, cheeses, pickles, platters of tomatoes ripened in costly winter sunlight, every red slice bundled beneath its own snowy blanket of mozzarella. The plates would not stop coming. There was twice as much as they could eat. Half would go back to the kitchen. The waiters would eat well tonight. As they should, thought Lula.

  She helped herself to a shrimp, amazingly firm and fresh and sweet, considering the season. Nauseating, nonetheless. Lula picked up her wine glass and put it down without drinking, glad now that she was sitting so far from Mister Stanley and Don.

  Zeke and Abigail stared ahead as if they were at the movies. It was easy to get Abigail’s attention, but hard to know what to do with it. Her laundry-bleach blue eyes scared Lula into asking, “How do you like school?”

  “My school sucks shit,” said Abigail. “My dad pays thirty grand a year so I can call my teachers by their first names.”

  “Every school sucks,” said Lula.

  Abigail was having none of it. “You want to know how bad mine sucks? Have you ever read Macbeth?”

  “I read Macbeth,” said Zeke.

  Abigail said, “We had to memorize a section of the play and recite it in front of the class, and I did the witches’ speech—”

  “Obviously,” said Zeke.

  “Right? Except that my teacher said I was taking the easy way, because it rhymed, but she’d pass me because I said it with energy and passion. Energy and passion. How gross is that?”

  “Extremely gross,” agreed Zeke.

  “Scum-sucking bitch.” Abigail screwed up her face and croaked, “Double double toil and trouble.”

  Had Don and Mister Stanley heard that? It was not Lula’s place to tell her lawyer that his precious little daughter cursed like a Hungarian.

  Zeke couldn’t stop looking at Abigail. Lula’s plate, on which there was one lone shrimp tail, vanished before she h
ad tasted the cheeses and pâtés. Annoyance turned to outrage and then, shockingly, to bereavement. She had missed the cold cuts at her own celebration. Platters of home fries and bowls of creamed spinach signaled the imminent arrival of the meat. It seemed like a mockery to set a bowl of creamed spinach down before Abigail, a separate portion identical to all the other bowls of creamed spinach she could have had, for free. But not for free, not free at all. This was costing Don a fortune.

  Deliciousness steamed off Lula’s steak, aswim in its pool of blood. Not having fun wouldn’t save Don money or bring the cow back to life. It wasn’t her fault if Eduardo the busboy and Don’s client had been deported. Or if Dunia had disappeared. Lula too could disappear. Enjoy yourself while you can.

  The conversation stopped as everyone chewed. Abigail masticated dainty bites of spinach with theatrical distaste. After a while Don Settebello asked everybody how their steak was, and everybody said good. Great.

  Don said, “How’s the writing going, Lula?”

  “Great,” said Lula. The same word she’d used for her steak. The last thing she’d written was, “Does a leaf fall in New Jersey if no one is there to see?” The day the Albanian guys showed up. She hadn’t written one sentence since. She hated lying to her journal. It was the one place in her life reserved for unadulterated truth. But if she wrote the truth, she would have to mention how much time she’d wasted lately thinking about Alvo. If she couldn’t write about that, best not to write at all. It would spare her the dilemma of how much to say or not, how much to admit to herself about being the kind of person who would hide a stranger’s gun in her trusting boss’s house.

  She said, “I’m writing a short story now. It’s about this government bureau that analyzes people’s dreams, and everyone has to report their dreams, and they’re on the lookout for any dreams that might indicate that someone is plotting against the state.” Lula held her breath. Neither Don nor Mister Stanley showed any sign of recognizing the plot of a novel by Ismail Kadare.