My New American Life

by Francine Prose

  She wrote, My grandfather’s half brother found some grapes. No wonder there was such bitterness between Albanian men and women. This was their version of Cinderella. What do you do if the girl doesn’t like you? Throw acid in her face, then pay for the plastic surgeon. If you believed the story, Earthly Beauty deserved it, stealing the guy’s money for a glimpse of her hand. But that was how women were! That was why you took your girlfriend out for an expensive dinner and then refused to pay for your wife’s dentist and let all her teeth fall out. If you still had any money left, you divorced her and found a younger wife who still had her own molars.

  Lula deleted the last line. Then she typed it again. “My grandfather’s half brother found some grapes.”

  She saved the file under “Earthly Beauty” and shut down Zeke’s computer. She put on three sweaters and a coat and grabbed an umbrella and headed out the door.

  The library was deserted except for nice Mrs. Beller, who had introduced herself early on and who always seemed personally disappointed that Lula could never provide the documentation required for a borrower’s card. Were Mrs. Beller’s tremors worse today, or was some bad news on her computer making her shake her head? She didn’t acknowledge Lula. Had Lula offended her somehow? Could the librarian have unearthed some awful secret about her?

  Lula went to the magazine rack and was soon engrossed in an article about a Texas dynasty literally and figuratively screwing each other for generations, when they weren’t crashing cars into trees or jumping off the roof. The story cheered Lula. It sounded like a family you might hear about at home, though the money would have been different, as would the trees and cars and roofs. An hour passed, then another. Without the quiet welcome of this undemanding place, she might have fled Mister Stanley’s long ago. Which might have been a good thing. Who knew where she would be now, how much better off, or worse?

  Eventually, she made herself stand up and put on her coat. She was relieved when Mrs. Beller said, “See you soon, dear. Stay dry.”

  On the way home, Lula passed a drenched terrier guarding its owner’s front porch. Ugly Dog to Earthly Beauty. What if the magic fruit didn’t make you grow horns but created some more believable, less disfiguring problem? A bad mood. Bipolar depression. The magic green-grape cure could be some ancient folk pharmacology that would thrill Don and Mister Stanley.

  Back in the house, Lula tossed her wet clothes into the laundry room and went up to her desk, where, she was surprised to see, she’d left Zeke’s laptop on. She was always careful to shut it down, especially when it was raining. Many friends at home had had their hard drives fried by lightning.

  Obviously, she was losing her mind. She’d left the Earthly Beauty file open. The cursor blinked at the end of the text. Lula read through the final section.

  My grandfather’s half brother brought Earthly Butey the pretty red grapes, but they were poison. She fell ill and almost died while he searched the world for help. Finally he found an old heeler in the mountains who said, feed her green grapes. That wouldn’t have been the guy’s instinct, the red grapes had done enough bad. But he did what the heeler said, and Earthly Butey got better and fell in love with him and they married and had fifteen children and lived happily ever after, and she never complained when the guy had young girlfriends well into old age.

  Lula hadn’t written this. She knew how to spell beauty and healer. Her story wasn’t about poisoning a girl and then curing her and she’s yours. Fifteen children? The wife who doesn’t mind the old guy having young girlfriends? What sicko male pig wrote that? A male pig who couldn’t spell.

  Or maybe someone was trying to make her think she’d lost her mind. She and Dunia had watched an old black-and-white movie on the Belarusian model’s TV about an evil husband convincing his wife she’d gone mad so he could put her in an asylum and steal all her money. But Lula was sane enough to know that someone had sat here and read what she wrote and finished her story for her.

  This was creepy in the extreme! Had Lula come home sooner, her chair might have been warm from her self-appointed ghostwriter’s ass. Frantically, she searched the house for signs of alien presence. Nothing had been disturbed. She should run back to the library and throw herself on Mrs. Beller’s mercy. But what would happen when Zeke came home to find the intruder still here? Lula should dial 911 and tell the police that someone had broken into the house to write fiction on her computer. She’d like to hear how that went. Anyway, no self-respecting Albanian called the cops for any reason, good or bad.

  Lula checked the house again. She even went down to the basement, which scared her in the best of times. Really, it was fortunate she didn’t believe in ghosts. When Franco, the waiter-sculptor, took her to his loft, he’d told her a story about angels finishing an artist’s work while he was away. Franco must have believed that spirits worked on his crappy sculptures, assembling the rusty bedsprings into outer space creatures while he was off serving red beans and rice. It was one of those things guys said when they wanted you to get you in bed. Could Franco have tracked her down and done this? Franco was grateful that she’d never once mentioned their one-time-only drunken night of awkward sex.

  Unless Lula had written some notes to herself and forgot, notes so rough she never bothered correcting the misspellings? She would have remembered. She had to be logical, look at the facts, be her own detective.

  It had to be an Albanian person who knew about Earthly Beauty. It was Alvo. It had to be.

  Maybe Alvo’s ending wasn’t so bad after all. Readers might prefer the randy Albanian codger with the fifteen kids and the harem. And what became of the Earthly Beauty? Whiskers, sagging breasts. Most people would think she got what she deserved for making her boyfriend suffer.

  Lula corrected the spelling and grammar and printed out the story, and that night asked Mister Stanley if he would mind looking at something she’d written. From across the kitchen, she watched him read. As he turned the last page, he said, “This is excellent. Can we share this with Don?”

  “Naturally,” Lula said.

  The next week, Don Settebello called and asked Lula if they could have lunch tomorrow. Just the two of them. During her work-visa application process, Don had several times taken her out for a burger to keep her informed about her case. All very proper and professional, the kindly hip avuncular lawyer reassuring the client in whom, he said several times, he saw his daughter, grown up. Surely he didn’t mean Abigail, who had better start eating right now if she planned to turn into Lula. She’d assumed that Don meant his feelings for her were the purely paternal good wishes that a powerful older man feels for a bright, deserving young woman.

  Don said, “Let’s go to Mezza Luna. At the moment it’s very hot, but I’m sure I can get in. The line cooks are all my clients. I need to ask you a little question. Maybe two little questions.”

  Lula couldn’t say no, though it made her uneasy to recall that subliminal sexual thrum she’d picked up from Don at the steak restaurant. Dear God, don’t let him hit on her and make life complicated. She had to admit it was flattering that an important guy like Don would knowingly violate the ethics of his profession for a shot at Lula, who lately had not exactly enjoyed an excess of male sexual attention.

  “Two little questions?” repeated Lula. She hadn’t meant to sound provocative. Could one be: Will you blow me? Don would never say that.

  Lula dressed up in her new clothes, this time without Zeke’s scarf, and took the three buses that, against all odds, got her to the restaurant on time. Don rose to kiss her cheek. On the table were a glass and a half-empty bottle of red wine. Half full, Lula reminded herself.

  “Something to drink?” asked the waiter.

  Lula pointed at Don’s bottle, and the magician-waiter produced a glass from thin air.

  “Brilliant choice,” Don said.

  Don asked after Stan and Zeke. Fine, they were fine, everybody was fine. When Lula asked Don how his cases were going, he stared into his wine and was silent fo
r so long she wondered if he’d heard her. He said, “I went to Guantánamo.”

  Lula said, “What happened?”

  “It took me two days before they’d let me talk to anyone, and then another two days before anyone would talk to me. And then . . . the stories they told me, it was worse than you can imagine.” Don closed his eyes for a few moments, leaving Lula free to look him in the face and see more anger and torment than she wanted to see in her lawyer’s face, or in anyone’s, for that matter. “You know what they call torture? Enhanced interrogation techniques. You know what they call a beating? Non-injurious personal contact. A suicide attempt? Manipulative self-injurious behavior. If I told you what I heard there, they’d have to kill us both. I could lose my security clearance, and my poor client would be fucked. Except he’s already fucked. I’m not going to tell you his name, he’s a Harvard-trained Afghan cardiologist, he went home to start a clinic, and some piece-of-shit neighbor got two grand for turning him in as a Taliban leader. The neighbor probably wasn’t even a shithead, just some desperate slob who needed the money. Meanwhile my guy gets three years of torture. No sleep. No food. Constant loud noise. Made to eat his own shit. Shackled and hung from the ceiling. Razor cuts on his penis.”

  Lula put her hands over her ears and lip-read Don saying, “Fucked.”

  “It’s great you’re doing something,” she said. “Or even trying to do something.”

  “Who knows what I’m accomplishing,” said Don. “Making myself feel better. But what will they let me actually do?”

  Why were Don and Mister Stanley always asking Lula questions that had no answers? She said, “During our dictatorship these things also happened—”

  “Meaning what exactly?” said Don

  “Meaning these things happen,” said Lula. She hoped the food here was good. “Human nature, maybe . . .”

  Don said, “I don’t know what else to do. Once you know, once you’ve seen . . . So I take my life in my hands from the minute I get on that ridiculous toy plane with rust holes in the fuselage and nowhere even to piss. At least I give these guys some courage, some heart. Let the so-called Justice Department know that someone is paying attention. Then I come back and eat this fancy food and drink this fabulous wine, and maybe the guy gets tortured worse because I tried to help him.”

  “That’s what happens,” said Lula. “Like I said, human nature.”

  Don said, “You’ve got to stop saying that. I never said shit like that when I was your age. I was Mr. Idealism. I was the guy who was going to save all the little guys from the big bad bullies.”

  Lula shrugged, very Balkan. “You should have grown up where I did. We knew the truth from birth.”

  “And what truth would that be?”

  “Put the little guys in power, and overnight they turn into the big bad bullies.”

  Lula stopped. Were they arguing? She didn’t want Don to think she was calling him naive. But it never hurt to remind him where she came from and what her country had been through. Don knew she was half Muslim. He’d said, Don’t make a point of it. Her visa application said Christian.

  Lula said, “So what’s the question you wanted to ask me?” If the question was about sex, let Don ask it now. Saying no would be harder after he’d paid for the meal.

  Don shook his head like a swimmer with an earful of water. “Oh, right. About that story you gave Stan . . .”

  “What about it?” said Lula.

  For a moment, she considered telling Don that someone had sneaked into Mister Stanley’s house and finished the story on Zeke’s computer. She felt like a child with a secret she wanted a grown-up to know. But she wasn’t a child, and if her coauthor was Alvo, Don Settebello’s knowing would only make everything more complex. She trusted Don, but only so far. She would wait and see what happened between now and dessert.

  “I thought your story was fantastic,” Don said.

  “Thank you,” said Lula. The waiter appeared with a choice of breads. Don waved the waiter away.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” said Lula. The waiter returned, and she helped herself to a crusty roll studded with raisins and olives.

  “Nicely done,” said Don. “I like appetite in a woman.”

  Lula buttered her roll and took a bite, and with her mouth still full in what she hoped was an unsexy way said, “You were talking about my story.”

  Don said, “Right. Your story. I took the liberty of showing it to a friend in publishing, and she gave it to an editor friend who, coincidentally, happens to be Bulgarian.”

  “Bulgarian?” Lula already had a bad feeling about this Bulgarian person.

  “Bulgarian,” said Don. “Anyway, she read your piece. She liked it very much.”

  “Thank you,” said Lula uneasily.

  “Don’t thank me,” said Don. “But she did suggest that . . . well, that story about the Earthly Beauty and the guy who wins her after going through all that abuse and the part about the grapes is a very popular Balkan folktale. So it seemed . . . strange that it happened to your grandfather’s half brother.”

  Cousin, Lula wanted to say, except that she suddenly couldn’t remember what she wrote. Maybe Don was right.

  Don said, “She did say that the part about the fifteen kids and the harem was extremely Balkan. And not the traditional ending. I enjoyed that part too.”

  Lula said, “It’s a short story.”

  Don said, “I thought it was true. Something from your journal.”

  “I’ve branched out,” Lula said. “I thought you and Mister Stanley knew that. Anyhow, calling a character my grandfather’s half brother doesn’t mean he was my grandfather’s half brother. I could call a character Don, and he won’t be you. Have you read Ismail Kadare? The greatest Albanian novelist? He wrote about Egyptian pharaohs and medieval monks to hide the fact that he was writing about our dictator.”

  Lula shouldn’t have mentioned Kadare. It was unlikely that Don would remember her passing off a Kadare plot as a story she was writing, but why take chances? She said, “Bulgaria was Disneyland compared to how we lived. How people still live in Tirana. Your Bulgarian friend should visit.”

  Don turned up his palms, and his fingers curled, groping for . . . what? He didn’t care about Bulgaria. He didn’t care about Lula’s story.

  Don said, “Camp Delta was a shock. You think you know, and you think you know . . . but when you see the real thing . . . I’m obsessed. I want to tell anyone who will listen. The loneliness, the pressure . . . Thank God for good friends and good food. I hope my daughter finds that out. Another bottle, please. Pronto!”

  “No, thank you,” Lula told the bottle pointed at her glass.

  “Yes thank you for me,” said Don.

  Neither spoke for a while. Then something fell on Lula’s hand so heavily that dishes clattered. At first she thought that a fat warm brick had landed on her fingers, but it turned out to be Don’s hand, pinning Lula’s to the table. Lula’s instinct was to shake it off, but she waited without moving.

  Don said, “You’re a beautiful woman.” He sounded as if he were shocked to suddenly find that out. He said, “Is it all right if I say that? If I compliment you like that?”

  “A compliment is a compliment,” Lula said, gracious but not flirtatious. “Always welcome, believe me.”

  Don looked at her over the top of his wine glass, and there was a moment, a split second, really . . . lawyer client, lawyer client, Lula chanted inside her head, telegraphing how much Don was risking merely by touching her hand. And for what? Human contact? Romance? Distracting himself from the pain and injustice of the world with a few hours of sordid, unprofessional, maybe actionable sex?

  And then, for no discernible reason, or perhaps for a good reason indiscernible to anyone but Don, something broke the mood. Don removed his hand from Lula’s and pushed his spectacles back on his nose. Don the lonely guy vanished, and Don the righteous lawyer replaced him.

  Don said, “This morning I woke up and looked in th
e mirror, and my hair was gray.”

  Lula tried not to look puzzled. Don’s hair, what there was of it, had been gray when she met him.

  “I’m quoting Chekhov,” said Don.

  “I’ve read him,” Lula said. “I don’t remember about the gray hair.”

  “Young people never do,” said Don. “Anyhow, by some divine intercession, or more likely thanks to some bureaucratic fuckup, they let me talk to another detainee. This one’s a businessman from Mosul with the bad luck to have the same name as some al-Qaeda motherfucker. Of course they don’t let me meet the big guns. The guys who actually did something or plotted something and are still entitled to protections, I don’t care how Dick Cheney tries to fuck with the Constitution—”

  Lula said, “If Hoxha and Milosevic had a baby, and the baby was a boy, it would look like Dick Cheney.” She’d been waiting months to say this to someone besides Zeke, but she’d chosen the wrong moment. To Don, it was a nonsensical interruption.

  “It’s fine if I meet with the innocent guys. Nobody gives a rat’s ass what they didn’t do. This guy’s been in solitary for months. The family found out and got in touch. The wife’s going crazy. The three kids are crying for their daddy. The guy just came off his hunger strike. He’s down to eighty-five pounds.”

  Lula said, “What’s he accused of?”

  Don said, “Nothing yet. The guy ran a charity. Funded religious schools. Helped out widows and orphans.”

  Lula said, “The KLA bought its whole arsenal that way, going from house to house in Detroit and the Bronx, collecting for widows and orphans.”

  Don said, “That’s the kind of cynical shit everybody says.” His scowl made Lula feel terrible for being one of those cynics. She made a mental note to tone down the Eastern Bloc pessimism, or realism, depending.