My New American Life

by Francine Prose

  “They dug him up?” said Mister Stanley.

  Lula nodded. “And reburied him.”

  “That’s awful.” Mister Stanley chuckled, then caught himself. “A little-known fact, I guess.”

  “Every Albanian fact is a little-known fact,” Lula said.

  Mister Stanley smiled at his cute Albanian pet.

  He said, “You’re priceless, Lula. Enjoy yourself while you’re young. Okay, let’s go home now. You were right. It’s freezing.”

  “Lula, este Jorge,” said Dunia, wrapping one flawlessly manicured hand around the wrist of the driver who had beeped for Lula to come outside and spare Dunia and her boots another damaging encounter with Mister Stanley’s snowy walkway. “Jorge, esta Lula. Mi amiga.”

  “Buenos dias.” Jorge’s smile lit up the rearview mirror.

  “Buenos dias,” said Lula, glumly. Lazy Dunia could have come inside long enough for Lula to give her the history of her relationship, if you could call it that, with Alvo. Describing her fantasy romance was embarrassing enough without having to do it in the presence of New Jersey’s most handsome driver. Even so, she was grateful that Dunia had, without hesitation, agreed to take Lula shopping. Despite everything, they had stayed friends, holding hands across the Grand Canyon of money and class that seemed to have opened between them.

  “Don’t worry about Jorge,” Dunia said. “He speaks fifty words of English, all having to do with local highways. I’ve been teaching him Albanian. Our secret language, right, Jorge?”

  “Si,” said Jorge. “Yes.”

  “Come to think of it,” Dunia said, “speech is not his language.”

  “How is Steve with that?” Lula said.

  Dunia slashed her forefinger across her neck and laughed. “I’m joking. Steve doesn’t want to know what Steve doesn’t know. Very incurious person. So what’s the desperate situation?”

  “I didn’t say desperate. I said serious.”

  “You said desperate,” Dunia insisted.

  Maybe Lula had said desperate. “Okay, I meant serious. I need something to wear.”

  Dunia raised one eyebrow. “That’s desperate? Baghdad is desperate. Hurricane Katrina was desperate. Ten-year-old Albanian kids working in a factory disassembling old Kalashnikovs is desperate. Did you hear about that?”

  “My boss told me,” Lula said.

  “Nice boss.” Dunia looked Lula up and down. She said, “Okay. Desperate.”

  “Short Hills Mall,” she told Jorge. “Gracias. Por favor.”

  It was easier once they were moving. Less intimate, in a way. Lula tried to talk without thinking, to just let the story of Alvo and his G-Men roll out. Or as much as she knew of the story. When she finished, Dunia was silent for so long that Lula had no choice but to contemplate the ridiculousness of what she’d just said.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Dunia. “You’re spending Christmas Eve with a guy who takes you to some Thai joint and screws with your head and sneaks into your house and takes a shower and writes shit on your computer—”

  “On Zeke’s computer. Plus he left me a present.” Lula missed Little Charmy Puppy and its unconditional affection. She’d made it bark so often that it broke and couldn’t be fixed.

  “What present? You didn’t tell me that part.”

  Lula smiled. Let Dunia imagine.

  “Presents mean nothing,” said Dunia. “Take it from someone who knows.”

  After that they rode in silence. Dunia said, “Bravo, Jorge! We’re here. This is the only decent mall, the others are big wasters of time.”

  “Wastes of time,” said Lula.

  Dunia shrugged. “Look where perfect grammar’s got you. So let’s be clear about this: You want to make sure Mr. Psycho knows he can fuck you if he wants to. Take it from me, he wants to.”

  “You’re one to talk,” said Lula. “You’ve had some pretty strange boyfriends.”

  Dunia’s pearl-dusted eyelids fluttered. Lula wondered if she was thinking of the tough little stockbroker who’d refused to do it in bed and who was always leading Dunia, flushed and dreamy, back from the men’s room and the alleyways near La Changita.

  “Don’t change the subject,” Dunia said. “Stop here! Forget the macho parking two steps from the entrance.” She flung open the door and trotted across the lot. Lula rushed to catch up. Was Dunia running away? Possibly from the idea of Lula’s romance with Alvo. True love and hot sex, even the chance of true love and hot sex, was the only thing that could compete with the standard of living that came with Dunia’s boring marriage to Steve. Love, or even the hope of love, gave you status, in a way.

  But if so, this slight edge was lost on the women who watched Lula and Dunia from the mirrored fortresses of the cosmetics counters. Under their scrutiny, Lula’s coat turned into a jester’s rags, in which she skipped after Dunia, distracting her friend from the saleswomen’s grown-up claims on her attention. They sized up Lula and looked away, as if from someone disfigured. Then they trained their come-to-me gazes on the one in the ostrich boots.

  “I need a new outfit,” Lula said. “Something sexy but elegant.”

  “Perfume,” Dunia told her. “Trust me. Forget the outfit, the short skirt, the fishnet stockings, the unbuttoned blouse, the fuck-me shoes. More wastes of time and money. Dab something expensive in a few secret places, and their testosterone pumps. Steve brought me home a study from a medical journal. Certain scents increase guys’ blood flow and give them massive hard-ons. Better than Viagra. Call a doctor if your erection lasts longer than four hours. The problem is, a different smell works on each individual guy. So Steve does his own research and comes home with this million-dollar vial of oil, probably illegal, he says it’s extracted from poppies that grow in the kitchen gardens of Afghan warlords. God knows where it really comes from. If I put it where he wants me to, it gives me a hideous rash. So now I have to smell like a hooker and pretend to talk dirty in Albanian. How much fun is that?”

  Did the women smiling at the two girls from their glittery counters suspect that the rich one was complaining about her sex life?

  “Pheromones,” said Lula. “Like with the insect family. That funny odor when you crush a beetle. To another beetle it’s the irresistible sex smell.”

  “The death smell,” Dunia said. “The day I met Steve in the airport I was wearing a bucket of Chanel No. 5.”

  Lula said, “How nice for the person sitting next to you on the plane.”

  “There was no person next to me on the plane,” said Dunia. “No plane. I figured I might as well wear it. If I tried to bring it home to Albania, some customs guard at the airport would have stolen it for his girlfriend.”

  Dunia trawled the counters, eyeing bottles, raising and dashing the hopes of women who had spent the day seducing an empty department-store aisle. Grasping Lula’s forearm, Dunia said, “Concentrate. Focus on this guy. Be him. Figure out what he’d like. Let your instincts guide you.”

  Now all the women were looking at them. How confident it made Dunia and Lula to stand there deep in conversation, suspended in time and space, feeling no compulsion to get on with the business of shopping. Lula couldn’t be this brave alone. No one could. How she needed and loved her friend! Dunia flitted from counter to counter, spraying perfumes on tissue squares and writing, with a stubby pencil, the names of scents until she’d narrowed the selection down to three or four squares. In what exclusive rich-girl school had Dunia learned to do this?

  “Smell them. But think about the guy.”

  “They’re all starting to smell the same,” Lula said.

  “My God, you’re hopeless.” Dunia kissed Lula’s cheek. The perfume ladies goggled. Did they think that Lula and Dunia were Russian hookers spending a stolen lesbian afternoon? She could see why Steve’s parents worried about Dunia. How wrong they were, how little they knew. But the lie they believed about her friend was another lie come true. Somehow they’d transformed her into the ambitious Natasha climbing the social ladde
r on which their son was the bottom rung.

  “I think musky,” Dunia was saying. “A guy who stashes his gun with you and pretends to be in construction—”

  “Pretends? He’s in construction.”

  “Pretends,” Dunia said. “Probably the fastest way to his heart is to pick up your skirt and show him. Look, no underwear.”

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

  “I understand,” said Dunia. “That’s why we’re doing perfume. Concentrate. Start again.”

  Lula sprayed and sniffed and tried to think about Alvo. But try as she might, she couldn’t conjure up the scenario in which one whiff of something spicy or sweet gave him no choice but to jump her.

  “Check out this one.” Dunia sprayed a cold mist on Lula’s wrist. “Give it a minute. Okay, sniff.”

  Lula closed her eyes and inhaled.

  In the littered courtyard behind her housing block in Tirana had been a glorious flowering tree that thrived on garbage, weeds, cigarette smoke, and the fried food aerosol that fell on it from the windows. Luckily it bloomed around May Day, so the tree was left alone by the neighborhood committee, which usually ruled that anything pretty or pleasing was Western bourgeois mind poison. The May Day tree bloomed for a week, and people would come downstairs in the evenings and gather in groups or stand alone to breathe in the scent of the blossoms. No one stole the branches to have inside their homes. It was the only time when Communism worked like it was supposed to. After the blossoms fell, it was understood that the kids could stay out late and have battles, flinging the slimy petals and hard stamens at each other. The perfume Dunia had sprayed on her wrist smelled like those warm spring nights.

  “This one,” Lula said thickly. The bottle—sapphire blue, like the pharmaceutical vials in which Granny used to keep her gardenia water—reminded her of Granny’s story about the woman who went around collecting tears and marketing them as a skin care product. Just thinking about that story seemed like asking for bad luck. Lula decided to keep the perfume in the drawer with Alvo’s gun. Let her new smell and his pistol spend some time together.

  A voice said, “Shall I wrap it up?”

  “My treat,” Dunia said.

  “I can’t let you do this,” Lula said.

  Dunia brandished her credit card. “Steve’s treat,” she told the woman.

  Chapter Ten

  Mister Stanley took the day before Christmas off and spent the morning rooting through the closets for some important item that turned out to be a package of tinsel that he draped, strand by strand, over the picture frames. When Zeke woke at noon, Mister Stanley, apparently having forgotten his plans to ignore the holiday, asked if Zeke wanted to go help pick out a Christmas tree.

  Zeke said, “What kind of sick trees do you think will be left on Christmas Eve?”

  Mister Stanley said, “Probably plenty. There will be plenty of choice.”

  Zeke said, “Then you don’t need me.”

  Mister Stanley said, “What the heck, does one even need a tree?”

  Zeke said, “What the heck, does one even need a tree?” and turned on the TV. Was he trying to exhaust the patience of his patient American dad? No, he was trying to remind his guilty American dad that his mother had abandoned them on Christmas Eve.

  At six, when Lula decided to start dressing to go out with Alvo, Zeke was lying on the couch watching the Yule log burn on TV, while Mister Stanley sat in a chair, watching his son watching.

  “Oh, look, it’s just like Communist TV,” Lula said in the grating warble she heard in her voice whenever she tried to brighten the dark air between them. “The newscaster would read us statistics of people starving to death in the West, and a clock would tick on the wall.”

  Mister Stanley said, “Zeke, do you think we could possibly watch something more compelling?”

  “No,” said Zeke. “I like this. It’s totally compelling.”

  Mister Stanley struggled visibly not to ask, then asked, “Are you high on something, Zeke?”

  “On holiday cheer,” Zeke said.

  Beckoning Lula into the kitchen, Mister Stanley said, “I think he misses his mom.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lula said, meaning sorry sympathetic but sounding like sorry apologetic. In Albanian they were different words, and the difference could mean life or death.

  Mister Stanley tented his fingertips like a priest. “Quite honestly, it was a challenge not to notice the symbolism and anger in the timing of my wife’s departure. I told you it was Christmas Eve.”

  “You did,” Lula said. What a heartless monster Ginger was. Yet somewhere in Lula’s own heart she understood Ginger’s panic. She was sure, or almost sure, that the remorse she felt for leaving tonight would vanish the minute she left.

  “I’d better get ready,” she said.

  Even as Lula told herself that her date with Alvo would be nothing special—really, you couldn’t say enough for low expectations!—she not only used all her creams and soaps but every one of the free bath-product samples she had hoarded from her first days in New York. There was a reckless glee in opening the tiny vials and anointing herself with substances so potent that the store had bet those precious drops on making her want more.

  She walked naked across the bedroom, opened her underwear drawer, and gently unwrapped Alvo’s gun from its cocoon. She held the silk in one hand, the pistol in the other, hesitating as if she were weighing them, deciding. She lay the gun on a hastily gathered nest of polyester and stepped into the silk panties, fastened the bra, and went to the mirror, braced for a vision of decrepitude and horror. But in fact she looked fit. Like a girl! Her ass hadn’t sagged all that much, amazing when you considered how much time she’d spent sitting on it at Mister Stanley’s. For a moment she drifted out of herself and floated into another perspective, the warmer, more admiring view of someone like . . . someone like Alvo. She imagined, as she hoped he would, slipping off the lace and silk. The physical symptoms of desire were unmistakable, even after a long remission. Like riding a bicycle, Lula thought, not that she’d ever learned to ride a bike.

  Lula needed to calm down. It would be unwise to start out on her first real date with Alvo in a state of high arousal.

  Given that Dunia had talked her out of spending money on a new outfit, “dress nice” had better mean her black dress and the heels that made her calves look thin but which she could dance in, if she had to. She put on her makeup, American subtle but heavy enough to convince an Albanian guy she’d made an effort. Even after she’d wiped off three different shades of blush and sprayed on the precise dose of perfume that, she’d learned through trial and costly error, communicated erotic interest without being too aggressive, she was ready twenty minutes early.

  Which was lucky, because so was Alvo. Her phone chirped, and a text appeared. Parked outside. Short, to the point, and now his number was on Lula’s contact list.

  She had rehearsed her exit, and it went smoothly, as planned. She grabbed her coat and let the door close tenderly on her “Merry Christmas!” This time she added, “See you soon,” to reassure them that she wasn’t leaving forever. As she walked down the path, her knight in his shining black charger beeped his horn—honk, honk, hello. The guy had a few rough edges. Maybe he was nervous.

  Lula slid across the seat and kissed Alvo on the cheek.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said.

  All Dunia’s painstaking olfactory research results were instantly corrupted by the unforeseen variable of Alvo’s strong cologne. Despite the fortune Dunia had spent, Lula was glad to let the scent of those long-lost summer evenings surrender without a fight to the peacock pheromones of Alvo’s preparations for the evening, which happily did not include the tight, shiny synthetics that so many Albanian boys favored. His black shirt set off the red of his hair, and in his black jacket and jeans, he could have passed for one of the guys who’d blown their trust funds on rum drinks at La Changita. Lula hadn’t wanted to go out with those guys, so why did s
he want Alvo to look like one? Because she didn’t want to be the bossy know-it-all, tutoring her fresh-off-the-boat boyfriend in the fashions and customs of their adopted country.

  They rode in silence, struck dumb by the awareness that they’d altered their smells for each other. That had to signify something, if only the likelihood that Alvo had calculated the probability of his getting laid this evening. Lula’s stomach fluttered. Dunia and her bright ideas. How much harder the perfume made it to pretend this was just a platonic friendly night out, Older Brother and Little Sister reeking like a pair of sex fiends.

  “Where are we going?” Lula asked.

  “The Bronx,” said Alvo. “Where else?”

  They crossed the George Washington Bridge, its bright loops improbably strung above the silver cord of the river. Down below, glittering hives of mist swirled around the streetlamps on the snowy banks of the Hudson.

  Alvo said, “So how are the boss and his kid spending their Merry Christmas?”

  “Watching the Yule log on TV,” Lula said.

  Alvo said, “Bleak. Very bleak.”

  “Please. I feel guilty enough,” said Lula.

  Alvo took the exit for the Whitestone Parkway. Then he said, “Are you sure you’re not fucking the boss?”

  “Jesus Christ!” said Lula. “How many times do I have to—?”

  “Sorry,” Alvo said.

  Lula said, “What’s the point of Christmas, anyway? We never had Christmas at home.”

  “Now we do,” said Alvo. “Now it’s a big travel season for Albanians. Everyone’s got to come here. To do what, I don’t know. Go to Radio City. Sit on Santa’s lap. Right now I’ve got three cousins from Vlorë sleeping on my bedroom floor.”

  So much for the option of ending the evening at Alvo’s apartment. But since when had Lula needed to do it in a proper bed? She’d grown so middle-aged and conservative since she and her boyfriends used to sneak out and rip off their clothes and roll around in the dictator’s bunkers.