Chapter 2
His hand tingled from slamming the receiver into its cradle. A chip of plastic had flown off the machine and been swallowed by the nap of the bedroom carpet. The one morning Yusef Jahani had slept in, had not set his alarm for 6:00 a.m., and had indulged in the sight of the news anchor’s sleek legs while he looped the ends of his silk tie, was the one morning that the telephone rang at 9:15 and his wife was not the only person home to answer.
He shouted into the hallway: “That was your daughter!” But Shireen was already down in the kitchen. Scowling, he donned his suit jacket in one swift motion, snapped on his gold watch, swept up his briefcase, and descended the stairs at an age-defying clip.
“That was your daughter,” he barked across the kitchen at his wife’s back.
“Oh!” She pivoted from the sink, an eager smile lighting up her raccoon-eyed face. He glanced at the table—an omelet, warmed lavash bread, feta cheese, honeycomb, waiting for him. Shireen’s smile evaporated, her mouth twitching with remorse. “Yusef-joon,” she pleaded. “I’m sure she thought you were at the office.”
“Thanks to you, Shireen, I am not.”
She took a tentative step forward, wiping wet hands on her apron. “Did you speak to her?”
He snorted, shook his head in disgust, and strode for the door that led to the garage. The woman was impossible. After all these years, she still held out hope that he would reconcile with their diabolical daughter. How had he tolerated such a simpleminded woman for more than four decades? He slid into the tumescent seat of his Jaguar. She appeared at the door then, her hand raised timidly for him to “wait” or “stop” or “please,” and he put the car in gear, watched her worried features grow dimmer as he backed out into the sunlight, and exhaled with satisfaction as he pressed the button to close the garage door, making her disappear.
She deserved it, he thought, coming to a brief stop at the bottom of the driveway, then turning leisurely in front of a car that was, he felt, traveling far too speedily, driven by a pimply-faced teenager. This was what happened when a man spoke to his wife about business matters. Last night he’d been more irritated than usual, and he’d made the mistake of complaining about a young Irish painting crew who had stolen the Westchester project’s only fourteen-foot ladder. Instead of merely listening, she started in with her pampering: Oh, but, Yusef-joon, you’ve worked so hard all of your life and now is the time for you to rest a little. He reminded her that he was never going to be like an American husband who spent his final years grazing on a golf course. At least go in a little later to the office, Yusef-joon. You deserve it. Right. Her suggestions were always idiotic. Furthermore, if Shireen were a properly loyal wife, she would not be speaking to Mitra either. She was lucky he hadn’t forbidden it over the years. But what did he get for being nice? Disrespect, that’s what. And that gleeful look on her face when she heard that Mitra had called—aah!
He glanced in the rearview mirror. Why, the pimply-faced punk was tailgating him! Not only that, the boy was craning forward, scowling, and giving him the middle finger. Yusef snorted and put his foot on the brake. At the busy Pilgrim Avenue intersection, he stopped and waited for a school bus to lumber up the hill before turning, which allowed him a few moments to gaze appreciatively at the condominium complex he had built, with its brick veneer, white Georgian columns, and double-story sunburst windows. The yuppies had bought them all.
On the main road, the school bus flashed its lights and slowed to take on a group of children. Yusef peeked into the rearview mirror and chuckled at the teenager’s angry contortions. When he looked back at the bus, a glint of pink caught his eye: a shiny backpack, the likes of which he remembered well, on the back of a little girl with dark silky hair so familiar to him that he could feel the strands slipping like bird’s feathers through his fingers. His throat constricted. He would never again experience that. This was how the ghosts of his lost grandchildren came to him—suddenly. An ambush, an attack, a weakening of his bladder. A gasp filled his chest. And then the life of his precious Anahita unfolded before him . . . the tiny baby who gripped his finger for however long he held her, the chubby toddler who crawled into his lap to feed him a rice cookie, the girl whose delicate feet walked on his back, whose dark eyes gleamed when he came home at the end of the day, the woman who never challenged him, always respected him, and who gave him those beautiful grandchildren.
The school bus extinguished its red light, and a plume of gray exhaust ballooned from its tailpipe. Yusef pulled the Jag onto the narrow shoulder. He didn’t notice the triumphant fist of the tormented teenager thrust like a periscope above the car as it passed. His eyes were fixed on the back window of the school bus, looking for another glimpse of pink.
The spell began to pass in less than a minute, which was as long as it took him to dial his office. “Any messages?” he demanded when his secretary answered.
“Good morning, Mr. J.”
He sighed. Vivian would not give him his messages until he returned her greeting. It was impertinent, but she’d been with him for thirty years; more important, she had the sharp mind and quick skills of a master bookkeeper but required only the salary of—what did they call it these days?—an administrative assistant.
“Good morning, Vivian,” said Yusef. “Any messages?”
“No messages, Mr. J.”
“Did you track down those punk painters?”
“No such address, Mr. J. The phone number’s wrong too. It’s a pizza place in the Bronx.”
He slapped the steering wheel with his palm. “I will be there in fifteen minutes.” He hung up, peered into the side mirror, and peeled out, raising a cloud of gravel. He was himself again.
* * *
As far back as anyone remembered, the Jahani patriarchs were landowners. Khans, they were called, gentry. Even after the Shah’s White Revolution in the 1960s when massive plots of private land were distributed to the tenants of these khans, the Jahanis continued to profit from land-related projects. And now, in America, it was the same, though not as filthy lucrative as it had been in Iran. Over the years, Yusef had slowly bought up land with an intuition for how the suburbs would grow and sprawl, and with an imagination that saw housing tracts, apartment buildings, and strip malls where forests and dairy farms had once been.
Yusef pulled into his usual parking space and hung his illegally procured handicapped tag from the rearview mirror. The Jahani family offices occupied the fourth and top floor of a stucco building fashioned in a faux Mediterranean style—teal-colored trim, arched portico, and pathways of tessellated pavers. The building was flanked by two twenty-story 1960s brick apartment houses, their air-conditioning units sticking out like tongues dripping saliva. Yusef rather liked the apartment houses, had in fact considered purchasing them, evicting their fixed-income widows and bubblegum-chewing single mothers, and converting the units into condominiums. But Nezam, his sister-in-law’s son, who now took care of the legal department, talked him out of it. “It’s not worth the hassle with the city or the bad publicity,” he’d said. “Besides, the buildings are ugly, Uncle.” This new male generation, Yusef thought, with its power-bar lunches, vibrating pocket gadgets, and diaper-changing skills, had no sense of architectural aesthetics. Sourly, he recalled how he’d allowed Nezam and the others to persuade him on the Mediterranean design of this, his own building, when he’d wanted to erect an elegant glass rectangle evocative of the Hancock Building in Boston. It had been one of his weak moments.
The “others” were the twelve or fifteen (he could never remember exactly) boy children of his various half siblings and relatives who had fled the Islamic Revolution in 1979 with little more than the clothing in their Louis Vuitton luggage and the jewels hidden in the heels of their wives’ shoes. Suddenly, the America he’d thought of as his alone, where he played gracious host to visiting kin, transformed into a melting pot for his extended family. Some of them, thank God, had moved to Los Angeles, where they marinated in a false revival of the bourgeois decades before the fall of the Shah. But the others had, to their credit, obsessed over the education of their children, sent them to Ivy League schools, and proffered them up to Yusef. He took them, of course. He’d shown his family the benevolence that their common patriarch had never shown him.
Pressing the elevator button, he chuckled slightly. Who would have imagined that he—son of a minor wife, orphan of a madwoman, ignored burden-child—would end up being the family patriarch? As the metal door slid open to admit him, Yusef smiled. Just for a moment.
As soon as Vivian heard the familiar click of Mr. J’s heels in the hallway outside the elevator, she beelined it to the galley kitchen to pour his glass of tea. By the time he made it past the marble reception area, with its faux-painted wall of a Persian rose garden, and wove his way through the maze of office cubicles (acknowledging no one), she was stepping carefully, silver tray in hand, past the gargantuan blueprint copier, conference room, restrooms, and her own office, where she quickly grabbed her steno pad and skittered out to fall in behind her boss as he entered his corner office.
The immense space was suggestive of an outmoded hotel suite; lots of chrome and tweedy orange fabrics, a sitting area with a long velour sofa and wet bar, a glass desk as large as a twin-size mattress. His employees called it the Retro Room.
He placed his briefcase on the desk, clicked it open, removed a pile of papers, and turned to unlock one of the oak cabinets in a bank behind his black leather executive swivel chair. Vivian laid his tea to the left of the blotter and took a seat on the other side of the desk, her pen poised over the steno pad.
“Where is Nezam?” he asked, his back still to her.
“At the project upstate,” she said. “Something about a failed electrical inspection in the kitchens.”
“And Kareem?”
“In Westchester at the Tarrytown building.”
“What is he doing there? Ali One and Ali Two are responsible for that.”
“He didn’t say, Mr. J.”
“Did he leave me a copy of the punch list on the Bergen duplex?”
“Not that I’m aware of, but I can ask Jane.”
He turned. “Jane? Who’s Jane?”
She paused slightly. She’d introduced them several times, but he never remembered the flat-chested ones. “A new secretary.”
He reached for the tray, popped a lump of sugar in his mouth, and slurped at his tea. Vivian could never get used to the sound; in her house, food noises were bad manners. Over the years, she’d learned to accept some of Mr. J’s incongruities, his “immigrant ways”—an afternoon nap on his sofa, slimy discarded sunflower seed shells in his ashtray, the waft of enough cologne to hide the odor of a postgame football team, and the fact that he never used his wife’s name. After all, no matter how long a person lived in the United States, there were bound to be certain things they were incapable of assimilating. Her Scottish mother had never been able to look at a banana as anything less than a prize. And her neighbor from Bombay, a computer engineer, had been blowing his snot into the flower beds for fifteen years. It took a generation for people to become true Americans. Mr. J’s kids were a perfect example. Correction: Mr. J’s kid. Vivian cringed as if she’d made the mistake aloud. Why couldn’t she go through a day without thinking about Anahita? He never mentioned it, but she was sure he grieved. What parent wouldn’t? Sheri in the billing department, who’d been with the company for ten years, thought Mr. J was made out of concrete. Not one tear at the funeral, she often reminded Vivian. He even smiled and thanked the rich suits for coming. Sheri could say what she wanted; Vivian understood stoicism. Besides, this was the man who had paid for her husband’s kidney transplant.
Yusef topped off his tea and leaned back into the desk chair. “Get Kareem on the phone and tell him I want the punch list on my desk by this afternoon. Have Nezam report to me as soon as he gets in. Take a letter.” Vivian flipped to a fresh page in her steno pad. “Attention: Mr. Francis Fogarty, Fogarty Investments—send it to his home address, Vivian.” She nodded. “Dear Frank, It was a pleasure to run into you and . . . uh—find out the wife’s name—last weekend at the country club, period, new paragraph. As per our conversation, I am very interested—correction, I am extremely interested in viewing your family property in Maryland, period. While the market in the area is very depressed, a rural property is something my wife and I are considering for our retirement, comma, a place for our family to gather, period, new paragraph. Please call me at your convenience so we may arrange a meeting—period. Looking forward, et cetera. Sincerely, et cetera.”
“Would you like this on your personal letterhead, Mr. J?”
“Yes, the Joseph Jahani one. And tell Pirooz to research the demographics of Cambridge, Maryland, with the idea of putting a golf resort on that property.”
“Pirooz isn’t in today, Mr. J. His wife had the baby last night.”
“He’s taking the whole day off?”
“I believe so.”
Yusef shook his head disapprovingly. “What did they have, then?” he asked.
“A boy. Ali.”
He sighed. “Jesus. Another Ali.” He dismissed Vivian with two fingers and reached for the Wall Street Journal.
* * *
Vivian sighed and slipped her shoes off under her desk. Her boss was particularly antsy this morning, and she knew it was because Mitra had come to town. There was nothing more irritating to him than his eldest daughter. She propped her bunioned feet on the extra chair, the one her part-time clerk used, the one a teenaged Mitra had used twenty years ago when she worked at the office during the summers. She’d often sneaked away from the reception desk to peer over Vivian’s shoulder at the ledgers and to complain about her father, imitating his accent and mannerisms so perfectly that Vivian dissolved into paroxysms of laughter. Once, she took Vivian’s eyebrow pencil and drew herself a thin mustache so she could better act the role; stiffening her back, expanding her chest, pointing a finger in the air, she delivered a speech on the merits of stenography according to her father: Eighty vords a meenute; a girl is vorth nossing widout dat. Vhat happens if your husband loses his job? Eighty vords a meenute and polite phone answering vill save you.
That girl had no fear of the man; and the other one—Anahita—all she had was fear. She’d worked at the office only one summer, answering phones in the sweetest way, tolerating every snobby secretary who called and every brash salesperson who walked through the main door, in a way that made her father proud. But being perfect took its toll, and Vivian had found Ana sniffling in the restroom several times. Mitra, on the other hand, had once told a flirtatious union official that if he didn’t smell like a sewer in ninety-degree weather, she might consider thanking him for staring so blatantly at her breasts. Another time, Mitra told the mayor’s secretary—a consistently rude person—to call after her PMS was over. She would beg anyone to take her place at the reception desk so she could prowl the firm’s nooks and crannies; examining blueprints and schematics; shuffling through bidding contracts; memorizing the names of floor tile samples, concrete textures, and roofing material. On her lunch break, she often persuaded one of the general contractors to take her along to walk a project; she kept a yellow hard hat and work boots in the trunk of her Fiat Spider. Once in a while, she sidled her way into the conference room, sat in a corner to listen as her father and the subcontractors battled with the architects over how to bring their designs in line with the reality of costs. He allowed this only because he didn’t want to risk her sassing him in front of the other men, but the rest of the time, he went out of his way to speak down to her, show her how inconsequential she was; he was determined to break her spirit, or at least to mold it into one of a conventional girl, a fifties throwback, like her mother. But she was unfazed. She kept coming back every summer, and sometimes after school if she wanted to learn the details of a new project. Mr. J wouldn’t let himself see how involved she was, how she could have been his natural successor, far more capable than any of the boys who came later, some of whom were a drag on the business, but secure in their jobs because they were family and, of course, male.
Vivian poured a fresh cup of coffee from her thermos into her #1 Grandma mug. She’d grown old in this office, watching the Jahani soap opera, at first envious of their money and then buoyed about her own simple life as their tragedies piled up. The Revolution in Iran came first, the losses from it—notably the confiscation of the Italianate mansion whose enlarged framed photograph hung on the wall in the conference room; apparently, it had been turned into a sanitarium—and the dubious gains: men, women, and children without a country. She couldn’t deny that Mr. J and his wife had risen to the occasion, helped find homes for the displaced, doctors for the traumatized. And when they came, those cousins and uncles and in-laws, it was hardest on Mitra, who was no longer the only eager disciple in the office and found her place as self-appointed apprentice to the contractors, the subs, and the architects quickly usurped by foreigners. But Vivian had to hand it to the girl; she’d found a solution, she was her father’s daughter. First she went to his rival in Manhattan, Manny Hourian—“the Filthy Armenian,” as Mr. J called him, though Vivian had heard only good things about the man, who wasn’t an immigrant at all, and had been in the business since his grandfather started it a century before—and learned everything she could there. Then, halfway through her graduate studies in architecture, there had been a terrible fight between father and daughter, in his corner office no less, one day seventeen years ago when Vivian was out with the flu. No one heard what was said, but when the two emerged, the look of rage on his face and of determination on hers left little to the imagination: those two might never talk again. Which was exactly what had happened.
Over the years, Mitra had called Vivian once in a while from San Francisco or when she was in town visiting, and they’d chatted about this and that, mostly personal stuff like Tom and his kidney problems; in fact, it had been Mitra who urged Vivian to talk to Mr. J about helping pay for her husband’s transplant. There are some things he’s soft on, she’d said. Sick people is one of them. Vivian knew that Mitra had started her own design and construction business in California (forgoing graduate school), that she’d bought a little run-down house, renovated it, and sold it for a profit, only to do it again and again. She didn’t know if Mitra was wealthy now—the girl wasn’t the type to brag about that sort of thing—but she assumed she was doing all right.
The click of the intercom came through the phone speaker. Vivian picked up the receiver and pressed the blinking button. “Yes, Mr. J?”
“Call my wife, Vivian. Tell her I have an early-morning meeting in Manhattan and I’ll be staying at the St. Regis tonight.”
“Yes, Mr. J.”
Vivian began dialing Mrs. J’s number but decided to wait until afternoon when she knew Mrs. J would be out with Mitra; then she could leave a message on the answering machine, avoid telling the lie in real time. Unaware that her lip was curling, she wondered if her boss had found a new girl or if he was still balling the blond word-processing temp from two months before.