How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

  Here she was now at the foot of the stairs, three years after they met, her hair still shoulder length but without the curl, a sign perhaps of a growing maturity and wisdom, a sign perhaps that there was not that much left to question or wonder over. As Mariam Woldemariam, twenty-eight years old and three months pregnant, lifted the loose door handle of the 1971 red Monte Carlo her husband had scraped and saved to buy in order to live up to an old black-and-white picture that was itself a lie, my father sat hunched across the steering wheel, thinking to himself over and over, in a voice that rang as true as if the words had been spit from a god, that if he wasn’t careful, this woman would surely destroy him.

  IV

  When I returned home that evening, Angela was already back from her office. She had taken her position at the dining room table where she often worked late into the night on whatever legal memo was due the following day. She seemed genuinely surprised when I entered. Since I had moved in she had never come home from work and found the apartment empty without knowing why in advance; doing so now had awakened a series of old anxieties within her.

  “Where were you, Jonas? I called you several times but your phone was off.”

  “I stayed late at the office to help Bill with a statement,” I said.

  I could see a faint trace of relief come over her with those few words, which I said as convincingly as if they had been true. Her greatest fear was of abrupt and sudden abandonment, whether it came through death or a simpler form of departure. She tried like most people to never show that, but it was evident even in the way she insisted on always holding hands when crossing a busy street, as if that offered any protection against what she feared.

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know that you would be so worried.”

  “You know that’s how my father left us,” she said. She kept a perfect, straight face whenever she said that. There were already at least a half-dozen ways this imaginary father of hers had left. She turned to him whenever she felt she needed to prove that she hadn’t actually been worried. He’d been arrested multiple times for various petty crimes from which he never returned. Once he’d gone out for milk and vanished, for cigarettes on a different occasion. I tried to detect a pattern in the stories, one that would say more about who Angela was and what she had gone through, but the obfuscation was too great; all I could see were hints of an injury that she had yet to let go of. This alone would have almost been enough to make me love her; the fact that she chose to make a mockery instead of a spectacle out of her past moved me, in part because a deeper damage was implied. On one side was Angela, my girlfriend; on the other, fragments of a child whose wounds from time to time pierced through the skin like the shred of a bone on a broken limb. I understood the reason behind her efforts and the price that she paid to make them as clearly as if they had been my own.

  “He never came home from work,” she continued. “My mother and I sat up all night waiting for him.”

  “Was dinner still in the oven?”

  “Of course it was. It would have been good too, but we never got to eat it.”

  “Because your father didn’t come home.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You told me last month your mom threw him out of the house.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “You also said you never knew him.”

  “Did I say that too?”

  “You want me to continue?”

  “You’re getting confused,” she said. She had trouble keeping track of her stories, which was her way of telling me not to take them too seriously while also asking me to remember every one in case one day the truth came spilling out. When and if that day came I wanted her to know I was ready.

  “You didn’t understand,” she said. “First my mom threw him out of the house. Then another time he didn’t come home from work. That’s the real story.”

  When I was leaving the apartment late one night to buy her a pint of ice cream at the grocery store around the corner, her final words to me, shouted over the television, were, “That’s how my father left me. He went out to get us ice cream and never came back.” I heard her laughing as I walked by the open window.

  On occasion she went public with her dark humor. At a party thrown by one of her former roommates during law school, a tall blond woman standing in the center of the small circle we had awkwardly stumbled into was talking, for no apparent reason, about her plans to go to Mexico for Christmas that year. The party was full of people like that—all around the room similar conversations were being shared about trips that had been taken or were being planned, resorts and great restaurants that had been eaten at. Angela later confessed that she found the moment impossible to resist.

  “Why did she think that we cared where she was going?”

  As soon as the blond woman had finished her sentence, Angela jumped in.

  “That’s funny,” she said. “That’s exactly what my father did. He went to Mexico just before Christmas, but then he never came back. I guess he must have really liked it. Maybe you’ll see him down there. Tall black guy. Used to have a big afro, but that was the seventies so it’s probably gone by now. Tell him his daughter Angela says hi.”

  We spent the rest of the evening trying to find ways to interject the words “That’s the same thing my father said just before he left us” into other people’s conversations. Mostly we kept the joke to ourselves, but when someone near the front door announced he was going to buy cigarettes, Angela couldn’t help herself. She turned to the four strangers standing closest to us and said, “That’s the same thing my father said to me and my mother before he left. ‘I’m going to go get some cigarettes,’ but then he never came back. Every time someone says that, I remember that night.”

  We were still laughing when we came home a half hour later. People had begun to stare at us, and Angela suspected that it was only a matter of time before someone came over and offered their apologies, so we left abruptly without saying a single good-bye.

  “If I was white, everyone would think I was joking, you know that. They’d laugh and say, Ha, ha, ha, Angela is so funny. Instead everyone thinks it’s true.”

  “It’s kind of true.”

  “There’s no such thing as kind of true. If I told you the whole story, you could say that it’s true, but you don’t know the story. You only know that I don’t know where my father is. But you don’t know why or how he left. I say I don’t have a father and everyone thinks they know the whole story because they saw something like it on television or they read about it in a magazine. To them it’s all just one story told over and over. Change the dates and the names but it’s the same. Well, that’s not true. It’s not the same story.

  “Believe me, Jonas. Once you leave the room all that sympathy becomes a joke.”

  I placed the book bag that I carried with me to the center every day on my side of the bed. Inside were the handful of personal items that I had kept at my desk: the collected poems of William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane, along with a framed photograph of my father in Rome that I had taken from my mother’s closet the last time I saw her.

  “How’s Bill doing?”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “Although I think he’s having a problem with funding.”

  Angela would later say that I had deliberately lied to her at that moment.

  “You said Bill was fine. You said you stayed late working with him. None of which was true.”

  But she would be wrong about the deliberate part. At the time I hadn’t given much thought to what I was saying. I had returned home and I had found Angela sitting at the table, buried in work but still worried about where I was, and I had thought it almost miraculous that such a thing should occur. Nothing in my life up to that point had quite prepared me for that, neither my parents nor the handful of lovers I had had before then. Everything else I said after that I said with the preservation of that image in mind.

  It took t
wo days for Angela to learn that I had lost my job at the center. She always left for work just as I was waking up, and of course when she came home, I was supposed to be there waiting; our schedules had remained unchanged. We didn’t talk about my work during those two days, except to speculate once as to what might have happened to one of the clients we had worked with together.

  “Do you remember the Kurdish family that came in just before I left?”

  “What was their story?”

  “Turkish—the father was arrested five times for no real reason. You may have said it was close to a dozen.”

  “Seven. A dozen would have been too much. He was arrested seven times—beaten and tortured twice. He had to give bribes every week to keep from being arrested again. His family was going broke and hungry as a result.”

  “Was any of that true?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt it. He was smart. He came in lying. I just helped him do it better. My guess is that right now he and his family are doing just fine.”

  The next day she tried to reach me on my cell. Had I wanted to keep the truth about my job hidden from her, I would have answered my phone when she called. Instead I let it ring for the entire afternoon without even looking at it while I sat on the bench Angela and I had claimed. There I tried to recall just what exactly I had said to her the night before, and how much damage I may have caused as a result. Similar slips with the truth had occurred before, but there was often very little at stake.

  At four p.m. she gave in and called the center directly. When Bill answered the phone, she asked him where I was.

  “He must have thought I was an idiot,” she said later that evening. “Does he know we live together?”

  “Yes. I told him as soon as I moved in.”

  “That’s worse,” she said. “Honestly, I’d rather be an idiot.”

  The fact that she had been embarrassed enraged her further; it made her victim to what she assumed would be other people’s pity. For the next fifteen minutes she puzzled over what had made me lie to her. “Are you trying to get out of this?” she asked. “If so you don’t have to lie. Just get up and leave.”

  And then later: “Do you want me to be angry at you?” “Are you angry at me?” “Do you want to get back at me for something?” “Did I embarrass you?” “Do you not trust me?” “What else have you lied about?”

  And for all of her questions I didn’t have a single response. Once found out, I had nothing to counter with in return. Angela yelled, and as her rage grew louder I found myself mentally backing out of the room, not all at once as I had previously done with Bill, but in slow, gradual stages so that it took some time before Angela noticed that all but the obligatory lights had gone out.

  “Please tell me you’re listening to me, Jonas,” she said. “You haven’t said anything.”

  “Of course I’m listening,” I told her. “That’s what I’ve been doing. I know you’re angry and you have every right to be.”

  I learned after that to never try to placate her with what she knew to be simple, generic words of comfort.

  As angry as Angela may have been that night, she was calm and rational once again a day later. There were other concerns on which she could focus her energy. I had lost my job, and after the following week, when my last paycheck arrived, I would no longer be able to help with the rent or the massive debt that Angela had assumed putting herself through college and law school. Even worse, I now figured into someone’s statistic—the twenty-five-to-thirty-five-year-old black male without a job; Angela had come too far in life to bear that for long. She never forgot the heights to which she had ascended, and at every moment she was looking back wondering how easy it would be to fall.

  “We need to find you a job,” she said. To which I wholeheartedly agreed. Two weeks later Angela came home with what she said was great news.

  “I had lunch today with Andrew, one of the senior partners at the firm. Somehow we started talking about you, and I told him you had just lost your job working at the same center where we met. He asked me what you wanted to do, and I said you were going to start applying soon to graduate school to get your Ph.D., but in the meantime you needed a job. He said he knew of one that had just opened up at his old school—a part-time teaching job that might not pay well but would be helpful in the future for the references alone. I think it would be great if you applied.”

  Even had I wanted to, I couldn’t have said no to Angela. While she claimed to have forgiven me for lying to her, the damage remained. Her trust in me, and our relationship, was far from repaired, and I knew that a part of her was constantly on the lookout for any sign of deception. During the weeks I spent at home before I eventually began teaching at the academy, I felt obliged to send her messages several times a day to assure her that I was either at home or diligently searching for a new job. I told her frequently that I loved her, and couldn’t have been happier than where I was right now with her. She craved stability and security, and I wanted to give that to her. And while the desire to root myself may not have been as deeply ingrained in me as it was in Angela, I had grown tired by then of floundering and could have easily said, if asked, that I was also looking for something more enduring. Even beyond that I had begun to sense that my place in the world was rapidly shrinking, that this was not an age for idle drifters or starry-eyed dreamers who spoke wonderfully but did little. A time would come soon, I was convinced, when I would be politely asked to step off board the ship that was ferrying the rest of the population, and in particular my generation, forward. If I didn’t latch on to something soon, I’d find myself thrown overboard, completely adrift, bobbing out to sea with nothing, not even so much as a life vest of companionship to hold on to.

  After three interviews and a background check that involved several phone calls to my former college professors, I was hired at the academy to teach a double course in literature and composition. I had studied English in college, and with the assistance of several friends had landed some temporary work copy-editing a couple of obscure academic journals, for which my work was criticized as being mediocre at best. It was enough, however, to qualify me to teach a course at the academy that the other teachers were reluctant to take on, or saw as beneath them, even though a name like mine, Jonas Woldemariam, often failed to inspire linguistic confidence in others.

  “Where’s that accent of yours from?” the dean of the academy had asked me during our first interview, after I had said all of eight words to him: Hello. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

  “Peoria,” I told him.

  He hesitated for a second before moving on, and I could see him wondering if it was possible that there was more than one Peoria in this world, another situated perhaps thousands of miles away from the one he had heard of in the Midwest and therefore completely off his radar. He was clever, though, and worked his way around that.

  “Did you spend a lot of time there?”

  “I was born and raised there.”

  “I see,” he said, by which he meant to say that he didn’t really see at all, and was even more confused than before. Afterward he led me on a personal tour of the academy’s four floors, the very last of which offered a view of Upper Manhattan that stretched to the lower end of Central Park, forty blocks south from where we stood. “It’s a beautiful building,” he said, and it was easy to hear the genuine awe in his voice when he spoke and the invitation for me to share in that awe with him. I had, however, paid scant attention to the details until then. I had been led up and down the stairs and through the hallways, but I had only been thinking of what could still possibly go wrong before the interview was finished. Regardless, I agreed wholeheartedly.

  “It’s fantastic,” I said. “Really.”

  When the dean called two days later to say that I had the job, I hung up the phone; I felt victorious. I had finally broken through the surface on which I had subsisted and was now going to be a part of real life.

  From the beginning I knew th
at I wasn’t going to be hired on as a full-fledged teacher; there were enough full-time faculty members in the English department as it were, and none, even those entering their third decade at the academy, were looking to retire.

  “It doesn’t mean we won’t have a full-time position for you in the future,” the dean told me. “In fact, I’m sure that if all goes well, we can all but guarantee that, but for now we can only hire you as half-time, or better yet, say three-quarter time since you’ll have plenty of homework to do.”

  I spent the months before the school year started supported by Angela, who in her relief at seeing me gainfully employed had rather proudly declared that her boyfriend didn’t need to serve tables or find another temporary job. “Don’t worry,” she told me with what was supposed to pass as a sly wink. “I got you. And once you start working we can talk about what you owe me,” which of course could not be counted in simply monetary terms since what I owed her extended vastly beyond the remittances she gave me to cover the costs of dinners and grocery bills. I accompanied her more frequently to firm-sponsored events, and when asked what I did I was proud to respond, “I’m a teacher.” We began to think of ourselves as a black power couple in a city full of aspirants, the kind who would someday vacation for an entire month in the summer and whose children would attend elite private schools like the academy with the tuition paid full in advance.