Chapter 13
As the sun rose over the East Bay hills, Mitra was still a bit drunk, which gave her a sense of being unmoored by thought. Standing on the deck outside her bedroom, she savored a kind of disconnect between thinking and feeling, a pleasurable psychic numbness. The cloudless periwinkle sky looked close enough to kiss, and her bare feet tingled against the morning coolness of the wood deck. She inhaled the bouquet of jasmine vines she’d planted down in the garden some five years ago. She closed her eyes and her body tilted and hummed, her silk kimono feeling like butterfly wings against her legs.
It was good to be home.
Home. Here. Not back east, where Ana and the children no longer were. She’d been thinking for all these years that east was home and west was simply “away.” Now San Francisco was home, or some semblance of home that she couldn’t yet define. When had that happened? Over the past year? Or had it taken less than one New Jersey week to make her feel like she belonged here and not there? And yet she knew it had been years since she felt like she fully belonged in the east, if ever she had felt that way. Even though she’d visited often, she’d been removed from the character of the place, like an immigrant who visited the old country, like her parents visiting Iran before the Revolution, complaining about the pollution, the traffic, the drivers, the marketplace haggling, the dust, the excessive heat. As if they were foreigners. Imperious Americans. And now, she harbored the same disapproval about the East Coast, thinking often about how California had better weather, fewer potholes, kinder strangers, healthier people, and a more convenient lifestyle. She said nothing to Ana or Shireen about these opinions, but once when she and Ana took the kids shopping and Mitra was unreasonably incensed by the length of the drive to the closest mall and then by the sweltering humidity they had to endure while walking through the vast parking lot, Ana elbowed her and playfully chided, Excuse us for being so backward!
Ana and the kids had visited her in San Francisco twice. Once when Nina was still crawling, another time just months before the accident, when they’d driven to Tahoe and gone white-water rafting on the tame Truckee River, getting stuck in the reeds midway, Ana taking a dangling tree branch in the forehead and flipping back-first into the cold water, the kids squealing with delight at the rare klutzy performance by their mother. But having them in California had felt cumbersome to Mitra; she had wanted so badly to have them fall in love with it, and in some ways Nikku did, promising that he imagined going to college here (astonishing to Mitra that kids were already thinking about college in primary school). All these years, Mitra had secretly harbored the desire that her family move to the West Coast, knowing full well that Bijan’s job with the bank required him to be in Manhattan, knowing full well that her father thought New York was the center of the universe—not that she wanted him to move—and that her mother would never leave him. Besides an occasional I wish you lived here to Ana, Mitra hid her hope; the idea would have seemed silly out loud, like asking a camel to move to the jungle. Ana got her sense of security from familiarity; adventure freaked her out.
Or so Mitra had thought. Because of Aden, Ana was now a mystery to her.
But no, she wouldn’t think about that right now, not on this beautiful California morning, this chosen home of hers, the frontier feeling of it even now, the fact that so many people were, like her, recent transplants. Sometimes (she’d never mentioned this foolishness), she felt like a pioneer woman, a trailblazer—when her work was slow, she would read novels by Steinbeck and Mc-Murtry in order to inhale this feeling of kinship with those who had left everything behind to start fresh. Part of her longed for the Gold Rush days when life was filled with dire obstacles: disease, extreme elements (Donner Party frostbite), bandits, angry Indians or Mexicans, cane-wielding preachers, brothels. Facing it all alone and surviving it was an accomplishment.
Still, she had hoped to be followed.
Inhaling deeply, she opened her eyes. Amazing how the dawn passed so quickly while the midday sun could seem like it lasted for hours. The sky had lightened to a milky blue, and the undulating brown hills across San Francisco Bay were beginning to smudge with a haze that portended a blisteringly hot September day. She smelled a hint of brushfire instead of jasmine, and her mouth suddenly tasted like dental fillings. She picked a handful of mint leaves from a corner planter, blew on them, scrunched one into her mouth like a true Iranian at table, and pocketed the rest for her tea, to be taken with three Advil to stave off the headache lurking behind her eyes.
She tiptoed into the bedroom because Julian could be a light sleeper. There he was, sprawled facedown and naked on the mattress, his taut, round ass marked with a stripe of sun from the skylight. His breathing was steady and strong, like the breathing of the young and guiltless. She turned her gaze from his honey-colored skin, soccer-muscled thighs, and unruly curls. He is my Mistake, came the unbidden thought. She cringed, then spotted his small suitcase in the corner. She’d forgotten about the medical conference. Was it in Vegas? Seattle? How many days? He would have left yesterday but had stayed so he could be here when she got back—in case you’re down in the dumps. Ever solicitous Julian, unmistakable son of a Red Cross nurse. And Mitra: oblivious. A week back east—a week filled with uncovered secrets—had snapped her back to reality. This relationship was wrong.
She closed the bedroom door softly and marveled at the way one torment could so quickly be replaced by another. She’d forced her painful thoughts of Ana to the back of her mind, but now it would be her relationship with Julian that tormented her.
It amazed her that they’d been practically living together for almost a year. That night they’d met at the bar, she hadn’t thought twice about going to his place; one-nighters were a pleasant escape for her, and as she got older, the men got younger. There were several she’d seen more than once, one she’d dated for almost three months—Michael, a software engineer who had the crazy idea of starting a dot-com site where people could auction off collectibles. Men like this had proliferated in the city, and they made for perfect occasional partners as long as a woman was willing to listen (or pretend to listen) to their hyperbole about changing the world. She recognized them by their spindly bodies, bobbing Adam’s apples, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and eager brows, curled in that expression so often seen on dogs who welcome their owners at the end of a lonely, housebound day. They were the new Gold Rush men, panning for venture capital, electrically charged with dreams of wealth and power. The last thing they wanted was a relationship.
She’d mistaken Julian for one of them that first night. When he told her he was a physician, she balked. She didn’t date physicians. Her father had always wanted her to marry a doctor. Best kind of husband for you is doctor, Mitra. Doctor is stable, calm, practical. Good person for taming you. She’d suppressed a shiver but hadn’t made an excuse to leave the bar. She’d been too buzzed or too lazy or too sad; she’d wanted sex. And the sex was good, so good, she realized now, that she’d ignored the most important warning sign: Julian was kind, kind and caring and devoted—the type of man sought by most women, the type she avoided precisely because she craved autonomy and emotional simplicity.
She knew she could justify what she’d done. She’d been vulnerable in her grief. And lonely. She’d allowed herself to care for him despite the warning signs. She’d luxuriated in his British accent, even though she’d fallen for that before; it was an accent that could hide a great many faults. Years ago, she’d gone to see Alaska and had met a photographer from Leeds on a hike outside Nome. All he had to say was “Mornin’, luv,” and Mitra was smitten. The curly long hair helped, and the Oxford education (which turned out to be a lie). They made love under the midnight sun and fed each other fresh sautéed salmon. Lucky for her, she had a bit of a stomach flu their last night, so she didn’t drink. What things one sees when one is sober: the dirt under his toenails and embedded in the skin around his neck, the beeswax yellowness of his crooked teeth, and the moist lint he picked out of his navel, the way he called her “babe” and his compulsion to check the UK football scores by phone every hour (whooping and chugging a beer when his team was ahead), and finally the really shitty pictures he developed to show her—he’d managed to turn the strikingly beautiful glacial formations they’d visited into vanilla Swiss almond. Mitra didn’t even remember his name, only that he gave her crabs.
As she descended to the first floor, the stairs creaking and squeaking, she thought about termites. Old Victorians were prone to them, but it wasn’t the tenting or spraying that worried Mitra (although it would be a royal pain), it was simply the wormy idea of them. She had a twitchiness about insects, and it reminded her of Carlos, her longtime contractor, who knew part of his job was to visit crawl spaces and attics when necessary because Mitra couldn’t stomach them. “It’s quite an ironic phobia for a building renovator to have,” Julian once teased, knowing full well that Mitra loathed having any weakness. He’d begun teasing her that very first night, after they’d made love in his loft apartment, which looked more like an artist’s place than a doctor’s (she’d expected sterile and organized). She was pleased by the several framed charcoals of nude Rubens-like women, one on the wall above the futon. Their lovemaking was frenzied and sloppy. Bodies coming together for the first time, discovery and newness fueling desire. But he hadn’t tried to remain serious like so many others; she couldn’t count the times her partners had prided themselves on the quick one-handed unhooking of her bra, as if such a feat was enough to bring her to orgasm. But Julian, fumbling unsuccessfully, chuckled hotly against her ear at their awkwardness. “Let’s make a deal; you get the brassiere and I’ll get my zipper.” She’d loved that. When it was over, they flopped back panting, the usual post-sex sleep sure to descend on them. But it hadn’t. “I’m starving,” he said. “You?” That had been her first mistake: sitting across from him at what he called his dining table—an old picnic table painted crimson—Mitra wrapped in a terrycloth robe that had obviously been washed with something royal blue, each of them scooping from a bowl of Cheerios. What else would a situation like that prompt but the first step toward familiarity and intimacy and attachment? She should’ve left.
After he’d told her that his mother was a nurse, she asked him the usual follow-up question: if his father was a doctor. “He was, but I never met him. They split up before I was born. He was a foreigner who resettled back in his country.”
“I’m sorry.”
He waved his spoon dismissively. “No need. My grandfather stood in pretty well.”
She liked the matter-of-fact way he revealed the facts of his life. Unpretentious and unaffected. Not like what she was used to: men who demanded, even in their tone, to be thought of as unique, as having “been through stuff,” as if being benched through half a Little League season or missing the junior prom were deep psychological wounds.
“He never tried to contact you?” Mitra asked.
“We think he died.” Julian was slicing a banana into their cereal. “There was a war in his country,” he added, lifting his gaze. “The Iran–Iraq War in the eighties. He probably fought in it. He was from Iran.”
Words like a gale of wind throwing Mitra back against the wall.
“Sorry,” he said at her stunned reaction. “I don’t mean to play with you. I know you’re Persian.”
She pulled the robe tight around her neck, as if he hadn’t already seen her naked. “How do you know?”
He shrugged, but in a bashful way, which relaxed her a bit. “I just know; I can tell. It’s hard to explain. Looks, gestures, something. . .”
She knew the “something” he was talking about. She looked for some telltale Persian feature in him—almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, eyebrows that threatened to connect in the middle. They were all there. It was the light hair and skin, the freckles and thin nose, that had thrown her off, and the complete lack of Iranian gesture. She’d fought an urge to flee. “I need a drink,” she said, but he offered her something better, and after a few tokes on a joint, she was calm enough to think more reasonably: He isn’t Iranian. He’s as British as I am American. He’s never been to Iran, never met his father, grew up without all the cultural bullshit. On technical grounds, her father would disagree: paternal genes were the ones that counted. And this made the situation rather amusing. Her father’s hackneyed words came back to her: There is a doctor. Thirty-two years old. He noticed you at the Yazdi wedding. And when she ignored him: What kind of a girl are you? Irreverent, unfeminine, frightening men away like a growling dog. If your sister marries before you, people will assume something is wrong with you, and you will never find a husband! Oh, if her father could see her now. Finally with an Iranian doctor—half better than nothing, but horrifically immoral. Even now, the memory made her smirk.
She entered her kitchen and turned on the flame under her stovetop samovar kettle. She filled a small teapot with loose cardamom-laced tea leaves she bought at the Persian grocery store on Polk Street, and emptied the dishwasher while the water heated to a boil, careful not to clang the plates and silverware together because the noise would travel like waves up to the bedroom. She poured boiling water over the tea leaves and fitted the pot into a round basin on top of the kettle, where she would let it steep for a while. She leaned against the counter and crossed her arms, still remembering: Julian reaching for her hand across the table, his touch gentle and warm, not proprietary or insistent. He’d turned her hand over and casually inspected her palm and fingers.
Mitra said, “You are not going to pretend to read my palm, are you?”
He met her mocking eyes with his own. “Sorry, no. I don’t believe in that shite, not even as a pickup strategy.” She laughed. He reached for her other hand and brought them side by side, examined them lightly with his thumbs. “Your hands are a mess, luv,” he said.
She tried to snatch them away, but he held firmly. “Wait, all these scars. Fascinating. Are you a sculptor?”
She snorted. “Nothing as lofty as that.”
“When I was a kid, my mum had a friend, a sculptor. Aunt Rina. Her hands were covered in scars and scabs, sometimes fresh wounds, blisters and bruises and calluses. I’d sit next to her and she’d let me inspect them, tell me what tool had caused this or that, and then what piece of art she’d been working on. I just thought it was incredibly cool.”
She chuckled. “Well, most of my scars are from rusty nails or broken glass or wood splinters. I restore old houses.”
“I wasn’t that far off, then,” he said, entwining his fingers with hers. “Aunt Rina used to say, ‘I shape things, Boyo, not the other way around.’”
“I love that,” Mitra said.
“Yeah, most kids—hell, most people—avoided her. She was intimidating.” He’d kissed her palm then. “Their loss,” he added, eyes sparkling.
She shivered at the memory and closed her eyes, realizing that she was going to have to shove those unbidden chemicals of attraction into a box in her mind if she was going to follow through with her decision. And it was the right decision. She thought about Ana and Bijan, the inevitable consequences that came from an uneven union. Already she had let things go too far; Julian would be hurt. He was young; he would find someone else. But she would miss him terribly.
Water rushed through the pipes; Julian was up. No doubt he had an early flight. Her stomach twisted with nerves. Of course she wasn’t going to talk to him about their relationship now, but just knowing her decision made her feel self-conscious about greeting him. She’d been gone a week, but it felt like a year. She reached for the moka pot to make Julian’s espresso.
When she took it up to him, he was in front of the mirror combing his wet hair back.
“Hey,” she said, placing the cup on the counter.
“Just what the doctor ordered,” he said. It was not something she did often, bring him his coffee.
“You being the doctor, yes,” she said as she turned and kissed him, pulling back before coming in contact with his shirtless torso. “Sorry I was asleep when you got home,” she said. “I was exhausted.”
“More than exhausted,” he said, and she heard the admonition in his voice. He was using the comb rather aggressively to futilely flatten the curls at his nape.
“I needed to relax,” she said, then thought twice. “Okay, I needed to pass out. The trip was more difficult emotionally than I expected.” She couldn’t help feeling defensive. Her elbow knocked against the towel rack, and the clang dramatized her irritation.
He dropped his arms. “I’m sorry,” he said. Now he was contrite, and she hadn’t wanted that. He tossed the comb onto the counter and she let him put his arms around her. “Welcome home,” he whispered in her ear. His lips found her neck, his hands slid down her back, her hips, he pressed her into the wall, and she felt . . . she felt . . . nothing. He could’ve been her brother, if she’d had one, or Nezam.
“What is it?” Julian asked, pulling back and looking at her.
Had she tensed up? No, but her palms were on his chest, lightly, not pressing, not saying no, but not saying yes either. “Nothing,” she said, tears suddenly stinging behind her eyes. He spied the bandage on her hand, took her wrist to get a better look. “What’s this?”
“Oh,” she exhaled. “Stupid me, I was a bit rough with one of my mom’s paper-thin tea glasses.”
“Let me take a look at it.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s nothing. The bandage is just so I won’t irritate it.” She gently withdrew her wrist and he placed his hands on either side of her face, rubbing his thumbs against her cheeks. “Everything all right with your family?”
She forced a smile. “Yes, everyone’s all right. It was just stressful. I need some downtime, that’s all.”
He straightened. “Sorry about this conference. I’d rather stay and pamper you, but I have to—”
“No worries, Jules. I think I’m just gonna sleep until you get back.”