Chapter 27
The letter came to the office, addressed in handwriting he vaguely recognized but couldn’t place. He sucked in his breath when he saw the return address on one of those stickers that charities give in exchange for donations: Mitra Jahani living on a street called Liberty in the city of San Francisco. His daughter.
He let the envelope drop. In his chest, he was angry, but his fingers were anxious. Well, that would not do. Nothing to be anxious about. No doubt Mitra had had enough of her mother and was petitioning him to take Shireen back, or perhaps to woo her back. Hah. Never. She would have to do the wooing. The pleading. The apologizing.
And yet he hesitated to open the envelope. He propped it against an old souvenir figurine of the Chrysler Building and marveled at the fact that he had never corresponded with his children in written form. Yes, Anahita would give him store-bought cards for his birthday and Father’s Day every year, bless her soul. She would always sign them Love you so much, Baba! Mitra was not so sentimental. No. If Mitra had written to him, it would be a practical matter. Like him, she was a person who used words for the purpose of accomplishing an outcome.
He decided to wait. Open it at home. Something to distract from that hollow, gloomy house and its freezer stocked with Lean Cuisine. He slipped the envelope into his briefcase and returned to his Wall Street Journal. It was annoying to read about Iran’s economic progress. Even under this fascist theocracy, the economy was thriving. His people were devoted, first and foremost, to growth and prosperity. Golnaz had said there was a black market for everything, that the sanctions didn’t stop people from buying their satellite dishes or gadgets or rationed foodstuffs, and there was a video pirate for every new film, a supplier for the best liquor, and a whirlwind of illegal house parties at which to enjoy such things. It made Yusef proud to know about such rebellions. And then Parviz had interjected one of his stupid professorial conclusions. “Ah, the heartbeat of capitalism; no wonder our two governments swing from utter devotion to utter enmity; our people are so alike.”
* * *
Yusef would later realize how fortuitous it was that he hadn’t read the letter at the office. He saw his alternate self—a crazed alternate self, certainly more youthful and stronger—walking from his office to Kareem’s desk, where the boy languished on the days when he wasn’t pretending to be “working in the field,” and right then and there running him through with his ivory-handled letter opener, straight into his gut. He could feel his nephew’s warm blood seeping onto his hand, the boy’s stunned face turning gray, and the sound of his own rasping voice calling him a pig. This was the word—in English—that came to him readily. He could think of no Farsi word more harsh than this to express his disgust.
Instead, at home in his study, he threw his whiskey tumbler at a framed photo of Jafar’s family, shattering the glass and scratching the lacquer on his credenza, where all the family photos sat like offerings on an altar. Jafar’s other children—the three useless daughters—were all in Los Angeles, none of them successful or capable enough to care for him, all of them mediocre and jealous of the others who had better jobs, none of them visiting their blind father more than once in a while, hardly calling, allowing Kareem to care for him when Kareem barely lifted a finger. It was Yusef who took care of Jafar. And now it occurred to him: Did Jafar know what Kareem had done to his sweet Anahita? When they had come to ask for her hand—the sour-faced mother still alive then—did they know what their son had been doing to his daughter? What were Mitra’s words? Sexual violation. Emotional blackmail. He couldn’t get the basement scene Mitra had described out of his head, and the fact that even after Mitra thrashed Kareem, he had continued. An animal!
His chest tightened and he leaned against his desk. He hoped for a quick death. Heart attack, stroke. For the first time in his life, he was glad to be an old man. And yet, in his mind’s eye he suddenly became the boy who stood at the bedside of his withering and manacled mother as she begged him to free her from that horrible hospital. He fell toward the waste basket and vomited into it, heaving like an animal.
The phone rang and he left it to the machine, then heard Lubyana’s purr—Where are you, Joey?—and he cringed at the absurd nickname he’d allowed her to use, at the absurdity of his choices. Repulsive. He lurched from the room as if fleeing an armed intruder.
When finally he made his way into the shower, turned the temperature ever hotter almost as a punishment, he heard his own sobs only after they came out of his mouth, only after he was on all fours, pounding his fist on the porcelain.
* * *
Vivian looked at her watch and was shocked to see that it was 11:11. She grabbed her office calendar from the desk again and peered at today’s date—December 23rd—but Mr. J had no morning appointments. Not surprising since most offices had given the week off. Again, as she’d done several times since 9:00 when her boss hadn’t shown up, she riffled back and forth through the weeks and months in hopes that she’d mistakenly entered an appointment with the dentist or the architect or the banker on some other Tuesday. She had a bad feeling.
She rang Mr. J at home and on his car phone for the fifth time. No answer.
She’d imagined this from time to time: a heart attack, a stroke, a fall; calamitous visions that came unbidden as the people in her life grew old. Now that Mrs. J was gone, Vivian couldn’t help but feel a certain responsibility for her boss. Her husband had told her to stop it, that she worried too much about everyone. Sadly, it was her natural inclination, being the eldest child in her family and having lost her mother at a young age. Also, she couldn’t forget that she’d had a hand in helping Mrs. J leave, and though she believed rationally and on principle that she’d done the right thing, she knew Mr. J would consider even her lunch with his wife a betrayal.
She used her key to go into his office, which she’d rarely seen without the lights on and the blinds closed. Her eyes were drawn immediately to the portrait of Ana and her children; it looked especially large against the deep green wall. And the shadows—or maybe Vivian’s imagination or the painter’s deftness—created contours and depths to the figures so that it looked less like a portrait and more like a bas-relief. It was creepy.
Vivian made her way around Mr. J’s desk to find his small leather datebook, in which he wrote all entries in pencil to avoid the clutter of cross-outs. She flipped through it and peered, then huffed in frustration and switched on the desk lamp. There it was, today’s date: two afternoon meetings with subcontractors in the conference room, nothing in the morning. The same as her own datebook. She exhaled and dialed Mr. J’s numbers again from the phone on his desk, which smelled like his cologne. As each ring came and went, she absent-mindedly cracked another one of her knuckles. What should she do? Whom should she alert? If she broadcast her concern around the office, she’d have the whole family in a tizzy. She imagined Mr. J’s annoyance at this.
As far as she knew, he’d gone straight home yesterday. In fact, she’d brought him a helping of her pot roast and mashed potatoes to warm up for dinner. He’d been grumpy—his usual state since Mrs. J left—but otherwise normal. In all her years at the company, he’d only missed work a handful of times due to illness, and he’d never not called in to check on things, even if it meant he hacked and coughed through the conversation. There were trips he took, of course, for business and pleasure, but still he called, no later than 10:00 a.m.
She had a dreadful thought: Had he made a late rendezvous with his mistress? Had he suffered a heart attack or stroke with her? And would she, whoever she was, know how to reach Vivian? No. She imagined Shireen or Mitra receiving a call from a trashy young woman—oh, stop with your imagination, she scolded herself. She wished Nezam were here, and she thought about calling him, but that would be a last resort; she wouldn’t drag him back into his uncle’s life while he was trying so gallantly to find a new path.
She shut off the lights and left Mr. J’s office. Back at her desk, she closed her office door and began dialing local hospitals, but she was disappointed, then relieved, at the end of each conversation. By lunchtime, she’d decided to do something she’d never done: go to her boss’s house uninvited.
It was cold, but sunny and windless. More like October than December. As Vivian rang the doorbell for the third time, she wanted to take her wool coat off; mounting anxiety was making her sweat. Her husband’s voice in the back of her head admonished her to give it up, stop fretting, it wasn’t her responsibility. She took the slate steps down and around to the garage, but the door was windowless. She hesitated at the head of the gravel path leading to the backyard. What was she doing? An image flashed through her mind: a naked Mr. J doing the nasty with a Loni Anderson type on his silk Persian carpet. She turned to leave, but couldn’t ignore the wash of anxiety that she truly believed was a dire premonition. She had many limitations, but intuition was not one of them.
She removed her coat and walked up the path, the gravel crunching under her shoes like dry breakfast cereal. As she wound around a row of evergreen shrubs, she saw him. Yes, she would remember later, she’d believed he was dead, sitting there on the patio with eyes open, skin ashen, stiff in the chair as if he’d been struck by a bolt of frost from an Olympian god.
Vivian was no stranger to dead bodies. Her sister had worked in a morgue years ago, and Vivian had been curious. Her husband often told her she should have become a nurse or a paramedic, so unperturbed was she by injuries and physical trauma. “Most people look away,” he said. “You try to get a better look.” One Christmas, her sons had given her a police scanner.
But this was someone she knew, someone she . . . well, she cared about. She steeled herself and approached him. He should have noticed her by now. She wasn’t more than fifty yards from him. She’d call 911 from inside, wait until the paramedics came, then call Mrs. J. Poor woman, she was going to feel responsible for the rest of her life. For a brief moment, Vivian wished this had happened when he was with his mistress, to save Mrs. J the guilt. She suddenly realized how well she knew these people, this family. It was foolish of her to think of herself as an outsider.
As she reached the edge of the patio, the two steps up to where he was sitting, his gaze—just his eyes, not any other part of his body—shifted to her. She drew in her breath. “Mr. J?” She saw a slight and fleeting frown cross his brow, and then his gaze shifted again, inward or far away—the way babies sometimes stare into space, as if their souls have left their bodies. Indeed, her grandmother used to say, “Don’t disturb, they’re communing with the angels.”
But he was alive! Oh, thank the Lord. Clearly, he’d experienced a shock of some sort, but she wouldn’t have to call 911 or Shireen or Mitra or any of the overemotional cousins and half brothers and nieces. But now what? Well, Vivian, she told herself, you’ve known this man long enough and intimately enough to handle this. Forget that he’s responsible for your paycheck. Forget that he can be a bear much of the time. Forget that you have nothing in common with him. You do. He’s just like you and everybody else.
He was wrapped in a thick navy-blue robe. Flannel pajamas underneath, visible at the collar and below the knee to the top of his leather slippers. She took a tentative step up. A shadow of white stubble covered his chin and jaw, and she realized that he dyed his hair and mustache to give it that salt-and-pepper look. Of course she’d known that, but it had never occurred to her to think about it; you saw a person every day and you stopped really seeing them. They were who they were.
“Mr. J?” she said again. No change. The slight breeze set his hair fluttering.
She slowly stepped forward and reached out to touch his hand, which was resting on the arm of the wicker chair. So cold, the skin.
“Mr. J, you’re going to catch your death out here. Let’s go inside and I’ll make you some tea.” Her voice sounded strange to her, small and trembling. She stood up straight—gave him room—though she wanted to take his pulse or feel his forehead, as if he were a child. Most important, she told herself, was to bring him back from wherever he’d gone.
Finally, his eyes saw her again, recognized her, she felt. She remained still. And then something remarkable happened: those eyes that could be steely so often, that could dart and squint and glare and yes, dance and shine with humor sometimes, they filled with tears and overflowed. Vivian couldn’t move, not until the tears fell onto his cheeks and dropped from his chin. Then she took his arm and gently urged him up.