My New American Life

by Francine Prose

  “What plot?” said Lula. “What base?” Mister Stanley must have decided not to call her attention to that news item.

  “Born-again jihadis,” said Alvo. “It’s a problem. No one in our family would go to my second cousin’s wedding because he wouldn’t allow alcohol or music. What kind of religion would even think about a dry wedding? Bad way to start off a marriage.”

  Lula almost mentioned that something similar existed in her family. Not that she knew her own jihadist cousin well enough to be invited to his wedding, or even to know if he got married. But something kept her from volunteering too much personal information. Who was Alvo, anyway? How had he found out her name? Cousin George? His aunt in immigration? Or was he an INS spy?

  Lula said, “Would you know how to locate an Albanian girl if she went back home and vanished?”

  “Why? You plan on vanishing?”

  “My friend,” said Lula. “Dunia. The one I’m worried about.” Tears popped into her eyes. Alvo looked alarmed. In their brief acquaintance, he’d already seen her start crying and not be able to stop. He probably thought this was something she did all the time.

  “Okay, look,” said Alvo. “I know people. Here and there. Maybe I can find out something. No promises . . .”

  He handed Lula his cell phone. “Write down her name and whatever contact info you have.” Then he thought better of it, took back his phone, and swapped it for a ballpoint pen and a paper napkin, on which Lula wrote Dunia’s name and Dunia’s mom’s address. Alvo read it and shook his head.

  “Glad I’m not there.” He put the napkin in his pocket, and Lula felt as if she were watching Dunia vanish into the linty darkness of Alvo’s jacket.

  The Thai woman returned and set down a platter of crunchy fried scraps. Lula helped herself to a mouthful of salty, oily, delicious . . . what?

  “Parsley,” Alvo said. Lula liked it that he knew, and that he not only ate with gusto but made little smacky noises. Of all the lies people told about sex, about the ratio between hand size and penis size, about the pleasure-delivering capabilities of the circumcised versus the uncut, the only one that was true, in Lula’s experience, was the correlation between liking food and being good in bed. The subject was pleasant to think about, only mildly spoiled when she remembered Don Settebello saying he liked a woman with an appetite.

  The woman brought more food. Duck country-style, very authentic.

  “Thank you,” chorused Alvo and Lula.

  “Every fall my grandfather shot a duck,” Alvo said. “One duck per comrade per year.”

  Lula picked up a chunk of duck and, with her front teeth, pried the moist spicy meat from the bones. She put aside the crispy skin she planned on saving for last. She caught Alvo watching her lick her fingers.

  “My father too,” she said. “The annual duck. Wasn’t there some national holiday when the comrades were all supposed to go out and get trashed on raki and fire away at game birds and shoot each other in the back?”

  “I don’t remember,” Alvo said. “No one ever took me along. Hunters were always getting shot.”

  Lula said, “My father taught me to shoot.” Bullet-riddled Madonna vogued in front of her eyes.

  “I taught myself,” said Alvo. “I had to.”

  Another missed opportunity. She could have sounded girlie, asking why a contractor needed a gun. She was sorry the subject had come up. What if Alvo wanted his gun back? “So what do you guys build?”

  “All commercial. Supermarkets. I thought I told you. We renovate supermarkets.”

  “Maybe you did,” Lula said. She was thinking about the supermarket to which she’d tracked his sales receipt. Someone was doing construction there. Maybe he’d bid on it and lost. Two and two were adding up. Adding up to zero.

  “I wish you’d renovate our supermarket,” said Lula. “It’s very organic and expensive, but there’s a nasty smell, like a dead rat in the basement.”

  Alvo said, “What’s it called?”

  “The Good Earth,” Lula said.

  “Near you?”

  “Five minutes,” Lula said.

  Perhaps someday she would know him well enough to tell him about finding the sales receipt and going to the store, hoping to meet him. Alvo would be flattered, or pretend. They would agree it was funny and cute, and then they would have sex.

  “Where do you live?” asked Lula.

  “Astoria,” Alvo said.

  “With who?”

  “Alone.”

  “I thought you had a girlfriend.”

  “Did. I don’t anymore.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” lied Lula. On a normal date, you could ask why he and his ex broke up and shift the conversation to a more intimate level. When things got really personal, maybe she could ask him about showering in her bathroom. Then perhaps they could talk about his finishing her story on Zeke’s computer. She would tell him that his ending, about the fifteen kids and the harem, was the part her boss and her lawyer liked best.

  The Thai woman replaced their plates with bowls, chicken curry for Lula, something meaty for Alvo. Not only did she know what they wanted, she knew when they wanted different things. Did the heat in Lula’s chest come from the chilis or from Alvo reaching across the table and chopsticking a hunk of chicken from her bowl? She pushed her bowl toward Alvo. Take as much as you want!

  She said, “So how did you get to this country?”

  “Boring story,” Alvo said. “My dad was an engineer.”

  Lula said, “Everybody from former Communism was an engineer.”

  “In Detroit he had a barbershop, another family skill. My grandfather cut hair in his village. He cut the mayor of Detroit’s hair, the whole family got green cards. So you could say I’ve moved up from barbershop to construction, or down, from engineer to construction. Depending on how you measure.”

  Lula said, “We went down. Any way you measure. Right after Communism ended, my father was crossing Skanderbeg Square, and he saw a woman with a huge bird hopping around on the sidewalk. She said it was an eagle, but my dad knew it was a falcon, big as a three-year-old child. Gorgeous. The woman was starting a business, renting out our national symbol for soccer games and races, weddings and private parties. She already had more orders than she could handle. But she had to hire a staff, rent an office, a phone, there were vet bills to pay. In other words, massive overhead. If my father wanted to invest, he’d get fifty percent in six months. Do I have to tell you what happened?”

  Alvo said, “To his investment? No. What happened to the bird?”

  Lula flapped her hands in the air above her head.

  Alvo said, “Too bad your dad couldn’t have found an eagle with two heads. That could have been serious money.”

  “Too bad,” Lula said. She had been alone when she saw the woman and bird. Her dad wasn’t even there. Why had she lied to Alvo? Because it was a good story.

  He said, “You people who stayed longer went through a lot we missed.”

  Lula found herself staring at Alvo’s hands, wishing she could take both his hands in hers and place them over her heart so he could feel their two hearts thumping in the same Balkan rhythm. “What could I do? My father wasn’t an engineer. He made shoes.” In a manner of speaking. One of his jobs included fencing stolen Chinese slippers.

  “Then how did you get here?” Alvo said.

  Lula said, “My aunt inherited some money from an uncle in Detroit. She’d kept it in an American bank, and when she died, she left it to me.”

  “You got here on a tourist visa? How did you manage that?”

  Lula smiled and fluttered her eyelashes.

  “The old-fashioned way,” Alvo said.

  “Have you been back?” asked Lula.

  “My mother moved back home,” said Alvo. “She lives in Tirana now. She and my dad divorced. I guess his being a barber wasn’t good for the marriage. I visit every few years to see her and eat her cooking. That’s how I know about the Paradise Club. Where I never saw
you.”

  “I was there,” said Lula.

  “I would have remembered,” said Alvo.

  The Thai woman brought sweet coffee and a wobbly orange dessert. “On the house,” she said. Alvo took a few bites, smiled at the woman, then pushed the pudding toward Lula, who polished off the whole plate. Alvo drained the last drops of beer, and Lula did the same, though it tasted awful on top of the mango pudding. There was nothing left to eat or drink and no reason to stay.

  Alvo said, “Will you be around next week?”

  Where else would she be? She would try to fit him into her busy schedule of nothing. “Sure. No, wait a minute. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I’m going on a college tour with Zeke and Mister Stanley.”

  “Like on The Sopranos?” said Alvo. “When Tony whacked the snitch?”

  “I saw some episodes,” said Lula. “But not that one.”

  “Before your time,” said Alvo. “So you and the boss are fucking.”

  “Separate motel rooms.” The question had never arisen. But she knew Mister Stanley. He and Zeke would share a room. She would get her own.

  “My father wanted me to go to college,” said Alvo. “The nearest community college was in ghetto Detroit. Fifteen percent white student body. The odds of not getting my ass kicked would have been better in jail.”

  Lula decided not to mention her career at the university in Tirana, though in other conversations—with the waitstaff at La Changita, and with Don and Mister Stanley—she’d taken every chance to boast about her education.

  Alvo said, “So is that part of your job? Little Miss Make Everything Right. All you Albanian girls are the same. Mother Teresa was just the smartest.”

  “Mother Teresa?”

  “The best at public relations. She worked a genius angle. Everyone in Albania is saving and scheming to move somewhere better than Albania. Which is basically anywhere. Only genius Mother Teresa moves somewhere worse than Albania. That gets you the Nobel Prize!”

  “She’s the most famous Albanian ever,” Lula said.

  “There you go,” said Alvo. “Her and John Belushi. Everyone knows what famous people are like when the cameras stop rolling.”

  Lula had always admired Mother Teresa, cradling the dying, cupping her wizened monkey hand around the last flicker of life. She said, “I can’t picture Mother Teresa throwing her cell phone at a photographer.”

  “Check!” Alvo pulled out his wallet.

  What had Lula said? She should have agreed with him about Mother Teresa. It probably wasn’t personal. Alvo had somewhere to be.

  “Thanks for lunch,” said Lula. “What about the week after?”

  “The week after what?” said Alvo.

  “We could get together the week after I get back.”

  “I don’t know,” said Alvo. “Who knows if the world will exist by then.”

  “It will,” said Lula.

  “Why are you so sure?” Alvo said.

  “Okay, maybe I’m not,” Lula said.

  They drove back in silence. As Alvo stopped in front of Mister Stanley’s, he kissed her twice, switching cheeks. Very proper. Little Sister.

  Lula touched his shoulder.

  “See you soon,” Lula said, at the same moment that Alvo said, “See you later.”

  That afternoon, Zeke came home with a bright new pimple flourishing on his chin. Lula tried not to notice, then gave in and stared. He was eating a vegetable tonight, no matter how he complained. Lunch with Alvo had left Lula feeling cross and oppressed by the compulsory niceness that had turned out to be such an important part of her job.

  She said, “We’re having pizza,” without offering Zeke the frozen hamburger option. What a disgusting way to live, eating frozen dog food, when twenty minutes away people were feasting on roast duck and fried parsley. “And salad. You’re having salad.”

  “I hate salad,” said Zeke.

  Lula said, “Let’s go to the other market for a change. The faraway one.” She could tell that Zeke heard the needling challenge in her suggestion that he venture beyond the borders Mister Stanley had circumscribed. His unteenage willingness to accept his father’s limits made Lula suspect that Zeke himself had his own fears and hesitations. His father’s rules provided a welcome excuse not to confront them. Though who could blame a kid for being reluctant to drive to the market where his mother sent him and his dad on the night she disappeared?

  Zeke’s smile looked less like a human expression than like an orangutan trying to make a rival orangutan back down. “I haven’t got time. I have to write some crap paper for English.”

  “About what?” asked Lula.

  “About crap,” said Zeke.

  Zeke drove them to The Good Earth, where delusional Lula imagined she might run into Alvo, there to ask if the owners wanted professional help eliminating the dead rodent smell from their basement. They bought mozzarella, tomato sauce, pizza crust. On the drive back, Lula said, “We should go to the other market sometime.” What character flaw compelled her to keep probing this sad boy’s sore spot?

  “My dad would have a fit,” Zeke said. “I think he checks the mileage.”

  “He can’t check it every day,” said Lula. Not until they were home and Lula was about to open the cheese did she notice that its package was puffed up and slimed with white.

  Zeke said, “That mozzarella smells like when kids used to get sick on the grade-school bus.”

  Lula said, “I saw on TV how they take moldy hamburger and smush it around so the red meat is on the outside and the green in the middle—”

  “You made me watch that story,” said Zeke.

  Lula dropped the cheese in the garbage, and Zeke followed her outdoors to put the plastic bag in the bin. Neither was wearing a coat, so Lula chattered to distract them from the cold. “Those bitches change the expiration dates, some poor kid eats a burger at the family picnic and winds up on life support so the supermarket can make . . . what? A hundred bucks, ten bucks, who cares how much. Human life is worth nothing to them.”

  “Corporate capitalism,” Zeke said.

  “Communism’s no better,” said Lula.

  “Obviously,” Zeke said. “Forget the cheese, okay, Lula? You can use tomato.” He sounded so tragic that Lula rushed them back into the warmth.

  “Mojito?” said Zeke.

  “Definitely,” said Lula. She made Zeke’s light, as usual, but didn’t hold back on her own and drank it quickly, then fixed herself another.

  She said, “One night at La Changita these customers played musical chairs. They were the last ones in the restaurant, and they’d run up a giant bill and left a humongous tip. So the staff let them screw around before we kicked them out. The leader turned his iPhone up loud, and the customers danced around the chairs, and when the music stopped they scrambled. The homeliest girl was the first one out, and she burst into tears. They don’t play that game in Albania. They play other sadistic games, but not that. Not enough chairs to go around was something we knew from life. No one would have understood what was supposed to be fun.”

  Zeke said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.” Lula drained the last of her drink.

  “How come you don’t have a boyfriend?”

  Did Zeke imagine that was what her story meant? She almost said, I do have a boyfriend. “What kind of boyfriend would I meet here? Even the mailman’s married. You want to fix me up with someone?”

  “My friends are pretty young,” said Zeke.

  Lula hovered over Zeke as he ate three slices of pizza, then tossed the rest in the garbage because she didn’t want Mister Stanley seeing the wretched meal she’d made for his son. After that she went up to her room. Let Mister Stanley drink his scrumptious glass of water solo.

  That night, Lula woke from a dream in which Dunia’s streaked face emerged from belching clouds of black smoke. How she longed for Dunia’s counsel, her bad hair advice, bad fashion advice, bad boyfriend advice, bad immigration advice, bad life advic
e. Dunia was the only one with whom she could talk about Alvo. She could ask Dunia to read the tea leaves of bad-boy courtship. But how could Lula even think about her own problems when Dunia might be in danger? Probably Dunia was fine. People changed e-mail addresses. They moved back home and forgot you. Or they bounced back your e-mails as punishment for your staying in New York without them.

  Or maybe Dunia wasn’t okay. Maybe lazy selfish Lula was just telling herself not to worry. In the bar on Second Avenue at the Albanian World Cup game party, she’d met a woman who ran a nonprofit that rehabbed Albanian girls after they’d been trafficked. The woman gave Lula her card, and Lula checked the Web site, on which you could order pillowcases the rescued girls embroidered, which was not an encouraging sign of their reentry into their old existence, or any existence at all. Wasn’t it time for Lula to tell Mister Stanley and Don about Dunia? What could they do? Alert Interpol and the CIA because her friend wasn’t returning her calls? Don would pay attention only if Dunia was in some secret U.S. prison, which Lula doubted.

  How could Lula find her friend, short of going back? A real friend, unlike False Friend Lula, would do anything necessary. She promised herself not to forget how lucky she was, living her comfy new American life in Mister Stanley’s comfy house instead of selling her body to some tuna fishermen in Bari or hiking up her skirt on a service road beside a Sicilian autostrada.

  Chapter Seven

  On the morning of the college trip, Lula was ready early, dressed in her peacoat and the cheap secretary suit she’d bought for her very first meeting to discuss her case with Don. By the time Mister Stanley came down, Lula had made a thermos of coffee and packed a bag of low-fat cheese sandwiches, cut in half. Mister Stanley tasted a sandwich half.

  “Delicious,” he said, taking it along when he went upstairs to wake Zeke. Forty minutes passed before Zeke slouched downstairs. His hair was glued in two hornlike tufts, and his black T-shirt and jeans looked slept in.

  Zeke threw on his jacket, opened the back door of his father’s Acura, and lay down with his face pressed into the crease of the seat.