When I was a boy, my father was always leaving us and coming back and disappearing again. When he was home, he managed to gamble away all the cash in the house, no matter where my mother hid it. Florida had a lot of temptations for a guy who couldn’t resist a bet. He did have moments of being jolly, of acting as if he got a big kick out of everything about us. He bought me a bike when he was flush, a Raleigh English racer, black with silver, very cool—“Here, Gerard, knock yourself out,” he said—and he sold it three months later. My mother threw him out for good when I started junior high. I wanted him back and I didn’t.
My mother was glad to have a steady job and she was very loyal to the hotel where she worked. People were, in those days. She was the head bookkeeper. “Ask Millie in the office” was such an all-purpose solution that Betsy, one of the hotel’s owners, gave my mom a pillow with this embroidered on it, as a tribute. And my mother loved that pillow. When I visited her at work, I was fed treats from the hotel kitchen—glistening hamburgers, hot caramel sundaes—but was not allowed to swim in the pool. Luís, the desk manager, played dominoes with me and let me show him my baseball cards.
When I was in ninth grade, my mother said, “Will you listen for a second? Stop eating and listen. I might get fired.” A sizable wad of cash was missing from the till. Betsy said she’d always trusted my mother in spite of her having an unsavory family situation. Everyone knew about my father. Betsy suggested that the thief, whoever it was, would do well to just put the money back before the police were alerted. They questioned Luís too. “They think we’re up to funny business together,” my mother said. “It’s ridiculous but I’m not laughing.”
“Luís is an old guy!” I said.
My mother, who was not that old for a mother, was weepy instead of loud and indignant. I did wonder if my father had managed to sneak into the hotel office without her knowing. Maybe her agony was in thinking this too. At the end of the week they left her alone but they fired Luís.
“Is he going to jail?” I said.
“Luís didn’t do anything!” she said. “You know Luís!”
Mr. Elegant Old Coot, Mr. Silver Fox, with his mustache and his deep, deep voice. He’d worked at that goddamn hotel longer than my mother.
“And nobody cares,” my mother said. “The union doesn’t care.”
The rank and stinking wrongness of it made me want to push the entire hotel into the sea. At the time, I saw the corruptions of the world as things to be trashed and slashed and ridiculed, I saw them from what might be called a criminal angle. Later I had other theories. I got my friend Dick, who was old enough to drive a car, to take me past the hotel at midnight, and we lit cherry bombs (what thrills of utter panic) and threw them—fast, fast—toward the empty lawn, where they landed in the bushes and exploded with great cracking booms, just as we peeled out of there. We could hear people shouting from the veranda above.
From the traffic light down the road, we looked back and saw flames in the bushes, which some poor sucker in a hotel uniform was going to have to put out. Dick, a perfectly nice guy, was slamming his hand on the steering wheel in savage glee. I whooped too, I did.
It scared the hell out of the guests—we knew this right away and heard for sure later. Let them leave, yes. Let this be the hotel’s worst October ever. The hotel told everyone it was pre-Halloween mischief, local kids gone wild. We lived in West Palm and weren’t even that local. My mother thought it was Luís’s kids, and maybe lots of people did.
A week later we all found out that the owners’ sleazy son was the one who’d made off with the missing money. And he was in some foreign country where no one could get to him. Luís was rehired, with apologies. But without his missing week’s pay. “They can never make it up to him,” my mother said. “Look at him. Look what they did to him.”
She was talking also about herself, the end to her cozy infatuation with her daily toil. She came home tired and sour. I was out of the house as much as I could be, pursuing my new hobbies. The elation of the cherry bomb attack was my gateway drug to further excitements of vandalism. We dumped human turds on somebody’s lovely private beach, we broke into my junior high and spray-painted Fuck Shit Cum all over the auditorium. It was pretty spectacular. Dick and I took a vow of silence, which we actually kept, and that was probably the only reason we weren’t caught.
If you’re testing your nerve, you need to keep going further. The next year, Dick’s friend Alan showed us how to break into and hot-wire a big fat white Pontiac parked outside the movie theater and we took it for a proverbial joy-ride, blasting the radio down the highway to Boca Raton and back. What I felt on that ride was a soaring belief, a white light of certainty, that we were really awake and most people were slaves and were asleep.
We did brag about that one. I was only fifteen, younger than the others, and I didn’t have girls to impress, but none of us kept our mouths shut. Which brought girls to me, in fact. Nicolette from my American History class started to hang around after the bell. She was okay, a bratty, complicated girl with a great rear end. Her friend Susan liked me too.
Once I was fooling around with girls, I had enough adventures at night to draw me away from mayhem with Dick and Alan. Somewhat. At the end of the summer the three of us set a magnificent bonfire on the beach and it took out a piece of somebody’s wharf. Well, that was fun to watch. I continued to do surprisingly well in school, much to my mother’s relief. This was partly because school was contemptibly easy, and partly because I still liked (as I always had) the privacy of reading. My mother said, “If you just remember you’re not the idiot you pretend to be, you’ll be fine. More than fine.” She said this fondly, patting my shoulder. She even laughed when I made an idiot face and pretended to drool. This may have been around the time she started having an affair with Luís, which made her quite happy for a while.
Luís was never going to divorce his wife. My mother (who got more confidential about the whole thing as time went on) was sure this was because he was Catholic, though it was clear to me he had plenty of other reasons. We were Jewish. (Even my father was.) They never sent me to Hebrew school or bothered with much of it, but now my mother proudly invoked Jewish tolerance of divorce. “What does the Pope know about marriage?” she said. “And birth control! Don’t get me started.”
What if you really thought there was a God (I didn’t) and you thought His rules were wrong? My mother said you could join another religion. “Let’s convert Luís to Muhammadism, and then he can have a lot of wives,” I said.
“Very funny,” my mother said. “Use your brain for something useful.”
Her thing with Luís went on for years. I went off to college (to Minnesota, where the winters were too cold and I had a scholarship) and I came home on vacations to find my mother all in knots about some new insult or frustration in her underground romance. My friends said, “At least she’s getting some,” which was a crude version of what I sort of thought. I did know, as well then as ever, what splendor my mother found in whatever she had with Luís, but I was too young to see why it would make her put up with all the other crap.
In college I myself had a lot of hot and fleeting romances. We enjoyed our drugs, in those days, and the mix of marijuana and sex was considered a personal revelation, a sacred message we each happened to decode. And I could never keep from talking about whether the mind was all chemicals and what that proved, conversely, about matter’s connection to spirit. I liked those airy arguments. In my head they were linked to the overwhelming evidence that the mundane world around me ran on hypocritical horseshit. Everything was in collusion to hide the truth, and my friend Dick from high school was drafted and sent to Da Nang on the word of government liars. I showed the kids from SDS how to throw a burning effigy of President Nixon on to the college lawn so that it torched some famous oak tree, which was kind of great to see. I engineered a small exploding rocket in front of the ROTC the next year, but I stopped there.
I never got into enough public trouble to risk my scholarship. I had to be careful. And by the time I graduated, I’d found my own sources for buying dope in quantity and was supplying a good part of the campus, at a very fair price.
I liked my day as a local big shot, but I knew from the years with my father the dangers of overestimating your own luck. My ambition in life was to go far but stay safe. Once I was out of school, I moved around, to Chicago and then to northern California, trying to get a handle on what I could do and not do. In San Francisco I had a girlfriend who was getting her master’s in art history and working as a stripper. What a strange and fabulous creature she was. While she slept beside me, after her night of professional display and private love, I rose from bed each morning, in a great act of will, and went to my steady gig at the state unemployment benefits office. They had me (what a joke) interviewing people about their job searches and approving their continuing payments. I was very lenient.
That summer, my mother made one too many demands on Luís and he decided at long last, with much apology and probably genuine sorrow, to put an end to their romance, right at the time Sandie, my stripper girlfriend, ran off with the bass player in the club band. My mother and I had odd, dry, sad little conversations about how things would get better eventually. We were both ripped to shreds. My mother took refuge in Miller Lite and TV and weekly bridge games. I went to Zen meditation groups and Sufi concerts and Sikh Dharma talks. There was a lot of that around and some of it helped me, with its elaborated reiterations that there was more to care about than any Sandie.
One night I was sitting on the floor in the basement of a bookstore, watching Sufi dervishes twirl around and around, their white robes flaring like sails, their arms outstretched. They were mostly just plain old Americans like me, but they wore high brownish caps someone told me were tombs for the ego, and they pivoted on soft boots, circling in place, while the music was plucked and blown and beaten by musicians. All of this was designed to take them on an inner journey from which they emerged no longer caring about petty crap. I knew that much, which was not a lot. I sank into it enough to say afterward, “Hey! Amazing!” to the guy next to me, who was going out for a beer with some other people, and that was how I met Adinah.
There were maybe ten of us, filing into a smoky bar, and we got reshuffled so that this small-faced woman with fuzzy tendrils of pale hair was looking up at me. “I’m still dazed from watching those guys,” I said.
“Is this your first time?” she said. Probably this wasn’t the pickup line it sounded like.
“I plan to come back,” I said.
But it turned out her allegiance was to another Sufi group that had music but none of this whirling. “If you’re repeating God’s name inside, you don’t need to have this performance,” she said.
“Don’t be a bigot,” one of the women said. “I hate it when you get like that, Adinah. You’re so sectarian.”
“They have to focus when they twirl,” some guy said. “If they have worldly thoughts while they’re doing it, they get dizzy and collapse.”
“Adinah just likes her own fucking group,” another woman said.
“This is like the Middle Ages!” I said. “I’m in the middle of warring religious factions.”
I said this out of feeling uncomfortable, but to my surprise Adinah thought it was funny. “We are such assholes,” she said cheerfully.
I had ordered a big pile of gooey nachos for the table, and she turned out to be one of those skinny girls who ate very slowly and neatly. She worked, she said, as a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant. “I bet they’re not big tippers, those veges,” I said.
“You guessed right,” she said. She didn’t look like someone who could have worked in a bar for real cash. Too skittish and big-eyed.
“What’s your favorite vegetable?” somebody at the table asked.
Everybody nominated a favorite sexy shape—the women picked giant zucchini, the guys went fruitarian and chose melons, with pantomimes to suggest the breastiness of them. Adinah just laughed, with her hand over her mouth.
This same shyness kept her from going home with me at the end of the night, although I thought she liked me. I gave her and about five other people a squished ride home in my old VW Beetle and I made sure to drop her off last. “To be continued,” she said, looking straight at me when I took her hand, but she got herself out of the car fast. I could see she was someone I had to go slow with.
So how could I be with someone like her after being with Sandie? I had no trouble, even in the early stages, intuiting the intensity of Adinah, the nuclear heat under the wispy flutter. She was quiet but she was never really mild. The soft pitch of her voice had the cadence of a strong will. And there was a fearless streak, as yet just a streak. Of the two of us, I was the more moderate, the more deliberating.
I went with her to classes given by her own particular Sufi group—their founder was from India, not Turkey—and I didn’t just do this in hopes of getting laid. I had other hopes too, of getting out of myself, of slipping into something larger than where I’d always lived. It was harder than I’d thought. There I was, apologizing to God for my separation from Him, when I didn’t exactly believe in God. But I had glimpses of another realm I might rise to later, if I could get more adept. It was interesting. I was very interested in the progress of my fate.
At the Sufi classes we moved our heads, swaying them to the right and then nodding down, saying no to petty bullshit and yes to God, over and over, while someone played an amazing giant lute called a tamboura and sang chants. He was still called Allah in the chants, and why not? We breathed in and out, we opened our hearts to God’s presence. I drove Adinah home across the Bay after the classes, and she’d sit talking to me in the car before she went in.
By the time Adinah and I became lovers, we had, in some way, beaten each other down. I had shaken off some of my boy-bluster, and she had grown more pliant, more hopeful. She muttered a prayer before she got into bed with me! I didn’t know what it was (she made it up), and it spooked me before my body decided, on its own, to be sublimely flattered. How naked she was, all of a sudden, turning to me, how familiarly female. I was sure I could carry us where we wanted to go. She muttered my name, nothing new in that, but it was a new and ardent form of Adinah.
She hadn’t had more than four lovers before me, but she knew herself better than some women do. She had great freedom in her, great ease, and then later, when we woke from our shared sleep and I watched her dress, putting on her dainty cotton underwear, a certain shyness came back and she was gawky as a chicken. Look at her, I thought. I could not have been more susceptible.
It was only the week before we first slept together that I’d heard she was from a family of Orthodox Jews. All her schooling had been in Jewish girls’ schools until college—and then she’d gone to Berkeley, of all places. Berserkly, as we liked to call it. She hadn’t been home to New York in three years. Her parents’ phone calls were still full of anger and pleading. “You’re all mixed up,” they said, sometimes with tears.
“They won’t give up,” she said. “They can’t.”
No, they didn’t know she went to any Sufi group. They already thought she was wild and promiscuous (ha) and addled with drugs. The Sufi group we followed was no longer attached to Islam anyway and proclaimed itself universal and tolerant. This explanation, Adinah said, would have gone nowhere with her parents. They would have shrieked to hear it. I wasn’t used to parents like that—I thought they were part of a world that had faded long since and was surprised they were so powerful to Adinah.
I told my own mother about Adinah and my mother said, “So she’s on her own now. They won’t make it easy.” My mother knew more about it than I did. After Adinah had sort of moved in with me, my mother liked to chat with her. Whether California had better weather than Florida, what Adinah made us for dinner. “Your mother has a nice personality,” Adinah said.
My own philosophical conflict with Adinah had to do with her being a vegetarian. She said what I ate was my own business, but the smell of meat made her nauseous. I didn’t really mind eating eggplant parmigiana or even soybean loaf for dinner, but I was naturally wary of being pussy-whipped. So we worked out some elaborate treaty, whereby I could store cooked meat (like bologna or liverwurst) in one corner of the fridge if I didn’t eat it in front of her. Like most compromises, this made neither of us happy, but we bragged of it so much to friends we began to believe we were peacemakers in love. Which was not untrue.
Adinah had been sharing a cottage in Berkeley with a swarm of people, so she didn’t have tons of belongings when she moved in with me. All the same, after the first blast of mutual joy, we were kind of crowded in my small space, never out of each other’s sight. So I got together some bucks left over from a minor marijuana deal Sandie had helped me with the year before, and I ponied it up for realtor’s fees and security, and I moved Adinah and me into a bigger apartment, on a hilly block in Noe Valley. The rent wasn’t a bargain, but I did have a salary.
I loved that apartment. It had a big bay window in the living room and great old woodwork and rooms full of nooks and crannies, very San Francisco. Adinah was touched that I’d done this for both of us, and, of course, I was touched too. I rented a sander and got the floors scraped to the nub, and then we practically asphyxiated ourselves swabbing polyurethane over them. I was the director of all of this, and she was my household. “I hate this job,” she said, happily. She wanted to name the apartment, the way people name a boat or sometimes a car, but I thought that was going too far.
Nonetheless she named it. We lived in “Heaven’s Door,” after the Dylan tune, knock, knock, knockin’ on. I pointed out that in the song the guy was dying, but she didn’t care. “It’s about the death of the lesser self,” she said. Well, I liked the song. “Want to go back to the Door?” she’d ask, when we’d been out at a party long enough. Even I started saying, “The Door is so big it keeps eating my socks.”
We had a mini-view of the eastern sky out the kitchen window, and we were always congratulating ourselves on this peek of cloudy white over the neighboring roofs. One unusually clear night we spotted the sliver of the new moon, and Adinah said, “Oh, there are prayers for that.” She meant Jewish prayers. For the moon? I’d never heard of such a thing. So were the Orthodox into astrology too? “No,” she said. “And it sounds better than it was.” I could hardly imagine the world she came from, with its rituals daily, weekly, monthly. “I like this moon better,” she said. “Our moon.”
Adinah’s parents didn’t have our phone number, but sometimes they called her at the restaurant where she worked. One night she told me, “You know what they called to tell me one more time? I was helping the enemies of the Jews by denying who I was, and I was only kidding myself if I thought otherwise. They worked their way into it at the end of the conversation.”
“They waited that long?”
She let out a little mirthless laugh. I put my arms around her for comfort. It was terrible to me that parents, of all people, could be this cruel to someone as gentle as Adinah. Who never said a really mean word about anyone. Who covered her eyes at any bloodshed on TV. I was glad she had me, at least, her personal fortress to lean on. “They’ll get used to your being this way,” I said.
“No, they won’t,” she said.
I’d known waitresses who made good livings, but Adinah, who worked lunches, was not one of them. The rent came from me, which I didn’t mind. We were managing fine, until my rust bucket of a Volkswagen broke down on the way home from work and I had to pay to get it towed and then it needed a new transmission. I was sure that when the end of the month came I would somehow have enough cash on hand for the rent, and I told Adinah it was no problemo, but then as the days went by I saw we had a bit of an emergency on our hands. What surprised me in all this was Adinah.
“You have to do something,” she said. “You better do something.”
“I know that,” I said.
“We can’t lose the apartment. Why did we ever get it if you’re just going to lose it?”
“I’m doing my best, baby,” I said.
“I think I believe you,” she said.
The last thing I expected from my doe-eyed girl was to be pressured. Was she venal at heart, looking for what my mother would call a lunch ticket? This made me remember she’d been eating almost nothing, to help save us, and I understood she was simply scared stiff. But I was still pissed at her.
On the other hand, I knew what I had to do. I called my friend Art, who got in touch with a guy named Spud, and with my last paycheck I bought as much as I could of this high-quality Michoacán grass he had just gotten in. And I wasn’t short on customers—from my office, from Adinah’s restaurant, from our Sufi group. I got us through the crisis just fine, and the two of us had laughing fits watching TV commercials stoned when we were home celebrating the rent payment. The Frito Bandito was pretty funny. Adinah, with her head on my shoulder, snorted and hooted into my neck.
But I didn’t like it. You had to be a certain way when you were buying in bulk. You had to drive to some creepy bungalow in the middle of nowhere, walk in quiet as a cowboy, sampling a joint and muttering Nice, very nice, rubbing the dope between your fingers, making a few worldly wisecracks, shaking the hand of some joker with guns in the house, watching your back every second. Then ride the highway with your radioactive cargo. You were talking yourself into thinking you were one sly dude with balls of steel, you were no one to mess with. This is why people get hurt if they surprise a robber. He’s busy being a robber. It’s why they have to rev up soldiers to be soldiers.
I kept those kilos of dope wrapped in a quilt in a closet in the tiny room Adinah used for meditation. I didn’t want a single one of our many customers to see how much I had. We hadn’t lived in the building that long, and a grandmotherly type across the hall said, “You get a lot of company these days.”
“The door is always open to our friends,” I said.
“Is that a fact?” she said.
So I had to worry about her too. Who knew who she was? All she had to do was make a phone call. I took it out on Adinah, who had wheedled me into this. “Are you comfortable on that sofa?” I said. “Maybe you want us to get a more expensive sofa.”
“Me?” she said. “Not me. I like the opposite. I left the land of white satin sofas and plastic slipcovers. That’s why I’m here.”
“You’re still a princess,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Like the princess and the pea.”
“Where’s the pea?”
“If I left a piece of pepperoni on the sofa, you would leap into the air.”
“At least I know what I think,” she said. “Some people go through life with no guidelines whatsoever.”
“Do you hear what you sound like? You could be Miss Prissy-Ass, my fifth-grade teacher.
“Is that how you see me?” she said.
“You’re too afraid. I want you to be not afraid.”
“What a shit-head you are,” she said. She was tearful too, tight-mouthed and frowning.
“You don’t want to be free?”
“Every sleazebag says that when a woman won’t sleep with him.”
“Excuse me for offending you,” I said.
It went on like that and it didn’t get better either. She must have wondered what she was doing with a creep like me. All her innocence, all her young-girl nervousness, made me coarser sometimes.
But all couples had fights, didn’t they? Especially when money was in the mix. A day later, Adinah announced that she was taking on more hours in that hippie beanery where she worked, despite my telling her she didn’t have to, what was the point.
“I want to. A few extra pennies, okay?”
“You kids are doing so well,” my mother said. “It lifts my spirits to talk to you.”
Oh, my mother. She still had to see Luís every day at work, which couldn’t have been fun, and then—guess what?—my father had turned up at her door, looking like hell and needing a loan, just a little bail-out to tide him over. Which she gave him. I said, “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.” And then she wanted to talk to Adinah, and I could hear Adinah saying into the phone, “Generosity is always cool. Name a religion that doesn’t say that.”
What did my mother know about religion? Bubkes. She still had some Yiddish but no theology. What I really wanted to hear was how my father was doing. “He’s okay but he’s a mess,” my mother said. “He always was but now he looks it.”
Afterward, Adinah and I talked about whether the truth would out, no matter what, once you got older; whether your physical form stopped being able to hide a thing. Plenty of older people lied to themselves—perky movie stars and oily politicians, sure of their charm and persuasiveness, sure their expensive plastic surgery actually worked—but their faces were so obvious. I myself was hiding a few things from the past (Adinah didn’t know all) and hoped to someday become the entirely straightforward figure I only half resembled now.
And what about Adinah? In some ways she was guileless—she told customers at work which items were overpriced, she announced, “I just farted,” when we were on the bus—but she was also veiled and silent. Often. And why not? Why shouldn’t she keep some of her to herself? I wanted us both to have privacy.
In May, we celebrated a year in our fantabulous apartment by having a picnic in Golden Gate Park. We’d both spent time in the park at antiwar demonstrations and it was somehow especially sweet to be using it for a more idle purpose. I was halfway through a surprisingly delicious spiced tempeh sandwich when Adinah said, “You know, I think I might be pregnant.”
Her little tendrils of hair were gleaming in the sun, and I thought, She looks about twelve, it’s not possible. (When was her last period? I couldn’t fucking remember. And did I know when she used her diaphragm? I did not.) Mostly I thought: What? “Are you sure?” I said.
Everything in her face changed. “Forget I mentioned it,” she said. “Never mind.”
I wanted to forget about it. I didn’t want to deal with it until I absolutely had to. In college one of my girlfriends had had an abortion. That was kind of normal. Adinah wasn’t normal; she was from the planet of pure feelings, a place with a molten core.
She was packing up the picnic stuff, the paper cups and the thermos and the box of chocolate cupcakes we hadn’t eaten. She was getting up to leave.
“Adinah!” I said.
“Never mind,” she said. She had the loaded tote bag over her arm.
“Sit down. Hey. We’re talking,” I said. “We’re talking.”
When she sat down, I said, “So how do you feel?” as if I were some kind of goddamn counselor. I knew how she felt.
Oh, she’d guessed for a few weeks, so she’d had time (she said, making her voice go quieter) to get used to the idea that this was supposed to happen. What did that mean, “supposed to”? My father believed in the great hand of fate and look where it got him. “What about free will?” I said.
“Stop it,” she said.
I could soften, if I wanted, or I could harden myself against her. I saw I could go either way, and I didn’t want to go anywhere. I could imagine myself single once more, back in the world as the stone-hearted person I probably really was. I didn’t exactly want to picture a baby (boy or girl?). Especially one I might argue to abort.
“I’ll have it with or without you, you know,” she said.
“Give me time,” I said, which enraged her.
But she did wait—where was she going?—while I tormented myself with the prospect of deserting her. We didn’t even talk during these days. When I came out of it, as if I’d been fasting, I saw clearly. I was staying for this. Who was I kidding?
I thought Adinah would never entirely emerge from being mad at me, but she mostly did. Twenty times a day we said to each other, We’ll be fine and It’ll be so great. By the time we got to, Timothy if it’s a boy and Rebecca if it’s a girl, the shock of it felt like a drug I liked.
One of her friends said that Adinah looked like a deer when she was pregnant. Her small, deep-eyed face, her slender arms and legs, the swelling bodily curve of her. She carried herself nimbly, with that slight sway she developed. I was the galumphing mate, trucking in supplies, fixing up the room. She nagged me about getting the shelves just right.
Adinah’s parents did not react well when she tried to begin by first telling them she was living with this guy who was me. Whatever they said (she didn’t want to tell me) was so scathing, so full-tilt, so heavy-duty, that she halted the conversation right there and decided not to speak to them again. Ever? “You have no idea,” she said. We had a nondenominational wedding, with a bunch of great Sufi musicians really wailing, and my wildly enthusiastic mother in attendance.
I had maybe four good years with Adinah. Becky the baby was a trip, as we kept saying. We didn’t know what hit us, but some of it was great. I was one of those fathers who couldn’t stop photographing her every yawn and tiny toenail. Adinah was used to kids—she was the oldest of six—and she got strong and fussy in a way I hadn’t expected. In one of the pictures I took then she looked like a pioneer mother, chin up, apron on, babe tucked into the crook of her arm.
We tried bringing Becky with us to our Sufi group—Adinah wanted to show how cute she was—but the kid took an immediate dislike to the music, and Adinah had to take her outside when she started bawling. Adinah looked martyred and dismal, standing in the hall jiggling the baby against her shoulder. So I made the noble gesture of staying home with Becky on the nights Adinah felt a need to retune her consciousness to the eternal. I was sort of lapsing out of Sufism by then anyway.
Around this time, I talked Adinah into letting me photograph her stepping out of the tub. Nothing lurid, but I took the film to a friend’s darkroom, no Kodak lab for these. “I look so pale,” Adinah said when she saw them, but she liked them, I could tell. They had the abstraction of black-and-white, and in the arcs and mounds and dimplings, the blurred aureoles and dusky triangle, Adinah’s personal flesh was elevated, made marble. We were otherwise in a morass of baby poop and bananas and spit-up. We never went out, what would we pay a sitter with? Our sex life was still okay, more than okay, but not all that frequent, and the pictures did us good, they felt like proof. I may have needed them more than Adinah did.
At my office I was such a pest with my baby portraits that some supervisor decided I should go photograph clients, to show them working productively at the jobs we’d nagged them into getting. I loved this assignment—J. Perez putting a pizza in the oven, A. LaMarca sticking her butt out to lean across a file cabinet, X. Jones leading the hokey-pokey at a day-care center. When a neighborhood newspaper picked up some of the day-care shots, I was so thrilled that I kept bothering the editor to buy more photos of mine. A million stories in the naked city. I got a great one of two guys fighting over their place in line at an Elvis memorial—eyes wild, jackets flailing, and they both had Elvis hairdos—and this was such a hit that a real newspaper (a major paper, if not our best) bought it, and eleven months later I talked them into a staff job.
I had two things going for me: I knew how to handle myself on the street and I had enough cool to move in fast for a shot and get it before it was gone. Sometimes they sent me out with the police reporter, when they needed someone in a hurry. Blood and gore. Me, holding my flashing camera over a facedown body, with cops all around making terrible jokes. All in a day’s work.
Adinah hated hearing my stories. “Don’t tell me about it,” she said. “I can’t stand it when people get all hip about how close they can get to evil. Like their numbness is something to brag about. It’s really kind of revolting.”
She had a point, but I had a point too: Didn’t she want to know what the world was?
“That isn’t knowledge,” she said. “How can you say that?”
There happened to be any number of women I could show off for if Adinah thought I was full of shit. I flirted with these women, in the newspaper office and on the street, but I didn’t, as they say, do anything. I had sold my freedom for love and I was keeping the bargain. I lived with two creatures I loved, didn’t I?
Adinah started talking to her parents again. “At least I don’t have to put on a midi skirt and long sleeves and a snood over my hair to talk to them,” she said. Sometimes she put Becky on the phone. And me. Hello, Gerard, how are you? Hello, we are fine, they said. And a happy holiday to you. What stiffness in their voices, what years of woe. They were brighter with Becky, whom I could hear gurgling at them. In their photos they looked entirely ordinary and benign—her mother’s wig was the same style as Rosalynn Carter’s hairdo and her father was smiling under his black plastic eyeglasses, with a yarmulke hardly bigger than a cookie on his balding head. How used to themselves they were, how forever stunned to lose Adinah. In our Sufi group, they had a song with a lot of percussion that was supposed to mean, The paths of love are long and complicated. It wasn’t human love the song was about either, which made me think all of it was too fucking difficult.
I came home one day with another story from work. A sanitation cop went to give a storekeeper a ticket for illegal garbage on the street, and the big bag of garbage turned out to be the guy’s wife, wrapped in plastic, sleeping off a drunk in the rain. A wife he hadn’t seen in five years! I got a shot of her standing up and waving like the queen. Adinah said, “That’s pretty sad. You don’t think that’s funny, do you?”
“I don’t,” I said.
“The other guys did.”
“Oh, yeah. They’re still laughing.”
“I knew it.”
“I like my work,” I said. “Do you mind?”
I knew she’d hate that story, so why did I parade it? She sighed. She’d taken to not bothering to argue with me, which wasn’t a good sign.
I was plenty attracted to certain other women—there was a reporter on the paper who reminded me of Sandie, a fast-talking redhead with a very great body. When we were hanging out at the coffee machine, giving each other the eye, I’d think, It’s not worth it, I don’t want to make a mess of everything, I have Adinah.
In the end it was Adinah who left me. Not for a man, but for a name. In her Sufi group she took on a spiritual guide (you were supposed to do this), a woman in her forties whom Adinah called Tasnim, which meant “Spring of Paradise.” Her real name was Carolyn (all the initiates had names their guides gave them) and she was a plumpish woman with a soft voice and blinking eyes. I’d met her at the group long ago, and it surprised me that Adinah picked someone so uncharismatic. Adinah said I’d always gone to Sufism as another drug, a way to cultivate certain states. So was that wrong? “You didn’t want to go very far,” Adinah said.
She was right that I didn’t buy the God part. “Well, that’s the whole thing,” Adinah said. “And it’s not like a single Person. It’s the whole Big Enchilada that everything else is inside of. You know?”
I was still interested in this, but I’d stopped needing it. I didn’t have the same hunger to get out of myself, now that my days ran on act-first-think-later and blood-and-guts and what felt like success. I was a fair-weather friend to religion. Adinah thought I was shallow.
I was not happy to know this, but we’d always had ups and downs. All the work of taking care of Becky could make our bed a place more for sleep than for love, but sometimes Adinah had gorgeous revivals of feeling. If I was patient, if I could wait while she got our girl to sleep, if she wasn’t too tired, a deeper hunger swelled in her. The frank physicality of motherhood seemed to take her to new frontiers. Lucky me, I’d thought. Okay, then some long lulls took hold of us. Nothing newsworthy in that. And for some time I was doing the male version of going through the motions. My body rose to excitement, but the rest of me didn’t much care. I kept on because I wanted the form of it, I wanted us to be following the ways of a family. As far as I knew, Adinah (who must’ve noticed) moved with me in that spirit. I thought we agreed.
The Sufi name her guide gave her was Satya, which meant “Sincere” or “Truthful.” “Yes!” I said. “You are. That’s a great name.”
Someone with this name, Adinah thought, wasn’t someone who could live in our house. What?
“We live in a house of fake feeling,” Adinah said. “You have to pretend every day to hold anything I say in any regard at all.”
“You don’t listen to me!” I said, not intelligently.
“If I do, it’s to humor you.”
“Very nice.”
“You don’t even bother to humor me,” she said
“You want me to say, Yes, I do?”
There was a bad pause. “This isn’t the way to live,” she said. “By lying. I have to tell you, I’m going.”
“Go,” I said.
I didn’t mean it, not really. I said it out of hardness—Go if you’re going—but I wanted us to stay together. I seemed to want many things. I wanted Becky, who was still in her twos, to cuddle up with me; I wanted Adinah to be with me on life’s highway; I wanted to patrol the world of cruelty with my mighty lens; I wanted the old side of my sexual nature to be free again.
What did Adinah want? Not me. She was stuck on the notion of me as bogus and false and fake, as well as loutish and unsuitable. I was in the way of what she hoped to be. How had we ever started? She said I wasn’t much of a father anyway, and maybe she was right. We said things we never should have said, and in the end I was the one who left the premises. Out of the Door and down in the street all alone. I had Becky on weekends. She cried when I came to take her with me and she cried when I dropped her off. Why were we doing this? Who was happier?
And Adinah wasn’t above making extra demands about money, inventing things they couldn’t do without. “Don’t act so surprised at what stuff costs,” she said.
“I thought you were such a good Sufi,” I said.
“We think the world is real,” she said. “You never got any of this right. It’s all God, but veiled. I don’t know why I’m even talking to you about it.”
“Because I’m Mr. Moneybags,” I said. Becky was throwing her wooden blocks at my knees while we spoke. “Cut it out,” I said. “Right now.” How could we go on this way?
We got used to it. Becky had her own room in the apartment I had in the Haight, a room with a pink record player and a dollhouse. She called me Daddy Dad Dad in case I forgot who I was. Adinah had a Sufi college student, a nice girl with an early version of punk hair, move in to help with the rent, although I was covering most of it, and she got work as a dog walker, which didn’t pay that badly.
I took up with the redhead at work—why not?—and I at least had my head always flooded with erotic afterimages. It startled me to be charged with so much sensation at the will of someone so other—I hardly knew her, compared to Adinah—and I was newly amazed by the mystery of these reactions. She had another boyfriend somewhere herself, so we had a good understanding.
Once I was late to pick up Becky because of her, and another time I actually forgot it was my night and I didn’t show up. How could I forget? I was too unfeeling and selfish to be anyone’s father. I lived in this truth for a month and stayed away—I yelled back at Adinah when she phoned, I wouldn’t take her calls at work, I experimented with being a total prick. Why pretend different? And then (when I woke up in sudden anguish) I begged to see Becky again, and Adinah let me. I guess she had to. I was so glad to see her, my Becky with her fat cheeks. But things were always a little fucked up after that.
At work I did a feature with a reporter who wrote about the resourcefulness of the homeless. I had been waiting for an assignment like this. I got shots of a man who’d trained his dog to panhandle with a cup tied to its paw, a guy in a wheelchair who’d rigged up a Mylar umbrella for an awning, a mother washing dandelion greens in a fountain to feed to her kids. I kidded around, I thanked them for their time. Some of them wanted a little payment—which we weren’t supposed to give as journalists—and some of them were embarrassed by all of it.
The photos had respect in them, I didn’t make them cloying. I could do that much. Adinah said, “Excellent work,” which pleased me greatly. She of all people could see why I wanted to remind the public that the unmoneyed were actually real humans.
She looked trim and healthy these days, in her jeans and her striped polos, with more color in her face. All that dog-walking was doing her good. Oh, yes, she was thinking of branching out and starting her own walking service. Adinah as an entrepreneur? “Not just me,” she said. “With someone.”
Her co-walker was a guy named Marty, who answered the door to the apartment one morning when I showed up—a tall guy with hair like a big black mop. Okay, I didn’t like him, how could I? Becky was clambering all over him, giggling. He was no mere business acquaintance. Adinah was still in her bathrobe. “’Morning, man,” he said to me. He called Adinah “Deen,” he called Becky “Beck.” Who the hell did he think he was?
“You think you’re going to get rich leading mutts around?” I asked Adinah. “You think there’s big bucks in dog shit?”
And he was there almost every time I came by. In her days with me, Becky liked to talk about how Marty could whistle any tune, how Marty told her stories about all the dogs. Itchy and Doodlehound and Fatface, he called them. I was paying rent so this sucker could sleep in my bed? Adinah said, “What do you care? He doesn’t live here.” If he ever moved in, I didn’t see it, because I had trouble showing up as often. It just wasn’t very pleasant to see how the waters had closed over what had once been my spot.
I got offered a job in New York, a city I always liked, and it was better for everyone this way. I had Becky in the summers. Not every summer (I said no a few times) and not all summer, but we had a great August in the Catskills when she was six and she really liked her Brooklyn day camp when she was eight and she was in a great help-clean-up-the-parks program when she was in middle school.
When Becky was twelve, Adinah switched to another Sufi group—she liked the leader better, he gave great talks, they had better music—and this group had kept its ties with Islam. My ex-wife was becoming a Muslim! “It’s kind of great,” she said. Fine with me. So when Becky spent her summers with me, did she have to be taken to a mosque? There was some discussion of this—was there even the right kind of mosque anywhere near me? actually, there was—and finally Becky was asked what she wanted, which was to be exclusively in Dad-land when she was with Dad. Later for the Sufis.
A girlfriend I had at the time was spooked by the mosque thing. “So what are they telling your kid in there? And she has a Jewish father! Do they even know that?” That girlfriend didn’t last long. I did try to ask Becky what they were telling her in there. “Oh, you know,” she said. “The Unity of Being stuff. Opening the heart. The old usual.” She seemed to just take it for granted, one more thing the grown-ups invented. “And there’s prayers, of course.” What she liked to do with me was go to Burger King, since cheeseburgers were not served at home. We went to horror movies together too, a favorite illicit activity. And she had friends from her park camp, nice girls from what our mayor liked to call the gorgeous mosaic of our diverse city.
What did I really think? Part of me thought Adinah was just filling her vacant life (the Marty guy was long gone, the dog-walking had to be a job with limited satisfactions) and part of me envied her. I was a serious person in my own way, but I’d stopped considering the unseen and how to work with it. I didn’t have what Adinah had, a capacity for devotion and a thirst to soar, an instinct for flight. I didn’t think she was crazy (were a billion Muslims in the world crazy?), but her parents must have thought that, if they even knew. They probably didn’t know.
And I’d been to Muslim countries, by this time, once to photograph a famous slum in Cairo and once for a trade conference in Jakarta. In both places I heard by-the-by invectives against Israel and the Jews from locals chatting me up, and I’d kept my mouth shut about being Jewish. Which I later felt creepy about, although as a photojournalist I kept my mouth shut about a lot of things. But would I have been any happier if Adinah had converted to Catholicism or gone to live in an ashram or meditated with the Dalai Lama? The great chasm would still have been there, between the realms where our gazes were fixed. Between us.
Over the years friends had asked if Adinah and I might get back together and I’d always said no. That was over. No pennies left in that piggy bank. We were, of course, tied forever by Becky. Sometimes I had daydreams of us in the same apartment again, back at the Door, and both of us better at it this time. You never forget certain years of being young. Not that I hadn’t fallen for other women—I’d had some long intrigues and some very hot flashes-in-the pan—but Adinah turned out to be my big deal. Who knew?
Maybe Adinah was going to meet a nice fellow at the mosque. I knew they sat apart, men and women, but somebody’s brother? I tried feeling out Becky on this—were there committees her mom was on, were there bake sales or festivals or fund-raisers? Becky said, “It’s too boring for me to know.” I said, “I met your mom watching dervishes, did you know that?” “No,” she said.
But I was the one who met somebody at a mosque. I was photographing an East Village mosque in a plain storefront building on First Avenue, for an article on flourishing traditions in the Big Apple. They paired me with a reporter named Frances, a go-getter who was very good at chatting up all the Bangladeshi and Bengali cabdrivers who left their shoes on shelves in the hall (I got a good shot of the shoes) before they went in to pray. She had an interview with the council president, in his endearingly crummy office, and drew out some quotable stuff from a Nigerian woman with five kids and a teenager with parents from Kolkata. Afterward we stuffed ourselves on smoky chicken and onions from the halal food cart across the street. She interviewed the cart guy too, who was Moroccan.
She had short hair that was dyed too streaky and a funny, rough voice. When I said, “This is a lot less trouble than covering the guy who threw his mother down the elevator shaft,” she laughed so easily I thought, Oh, she likes me. I started telling her about that story—the mother was not a nice person—and she said, “Please. I had the one where a middle school kid stole crack from a teacher.” The conversation seemed very comradely to the two of us.
She was closer to my age than I’d thought at first. She had a son older than Becky, she’d grown up in Staten Island, she had a brother who was a priest, and by the time I drove us back to the newsroom, we both knew something was starting between us.
Frances was my big stroke of luck. She was not simple to be with (full of opinions she wouldn’t let rest), and during our first six months together she could never stay over because her boy was still in high school, but she was my best idea yet of who to love. Even Becky, who took a whole summer to come around, said, “Frances knows what’s going on.” Aside from her sex appeal, Frances was what my mother used to call a good egg. Once we got over some of the initial stupidities and misfirings, we were kind of dazzling as a couple.
It wasn’t until the fourth year, when we actually moved in together, that Frances found herself talking to Adinah on the phone. The women were entirely civil and friendly, two rational beings—what did they have to fight over?—as they discussed Becky’s plane reservations from California. Dogs were barking in the background, Frances told me later, yap yap yap. Adinah provided home boarding, for extra bucks, when she could.
“Doesn’t the Koran have something against dogs?” Frances said.
“Not the Koran itself. Not at all. And she says there are different traditions,” I said.
Frances did give me a look that said, She’s so odd, but it wasn’t a mean look.
As it happened, I was stuck way up in East Harlem, shooting some cop talking about retirement benefits, when the World Trade Center was smashed to rubble by two planes. Once I could get through to Frances to make sure she was okay, once I called my mother in Florida to tell her I was fine, once they started flashing pictures of Osama bin Laden on the TV monitors at work, I kept thinking I had to get to California to protect Adinah and Becky from anti-Muslim bigots. They were sitting ducks, my girls. Becky was out of school and living at home, back at the Door till she could find a job. When I finally got Adinah on the phone, she said, “Oh! We were so worried about you. It’s so great to hear you’re all right. You’re all right?”
“Please be careful,” I said. “Don’t parade around being a Muslim right now, okay?”
“Careful how?” she said. “Do you think there’s a lynch mob in the streets?”
“I don’t like to think of the two of you alone,” I said.
“Becky’s out with the dogs now. And the mosque is fine too. I was just there. No problems.”
“You were where?”
“Of course. Everyone came. It was very moving.”
“You took Becky with you?” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”
Adinah said Becky was twenty-three and could make her own decisions. “I’m not bringing her anyplace. I have to tell you, you’re thinking about this in entirely the wrong way. I know you want to guard us, but how? It’s kind of a grandiose idea about yourself. This is what happens to people’s egos without religion.”
“Oh, is it?”
“I’m sorry to say it is.”
“This isn’t such a great week for religion,” I said.
“In my house it is,” she said.
“You know how you sound?”
“I hate it when you’re an asshole,” she said.
One of the photos I took at that time won a prize (a cop in a paper air-filter mask reading a wall of those early, futile posters for the missing). It wasn’t hard to catch a long, sad story in an instant during those days, and I was, first and foremost, a street photographer. My mother was so pleased about my getting a prize she talked about it nonstop. There were a lot better photos than the one I took, and I envied the people who got to the scene fast enough. “I wouldn’t tell anyone about this envy if I were you,” Frances said.
I always wanted to be out in the world, taking in as much as I could take, and was this now creepy of me? Should I be mourning and not staring? The newsroom lost its rowdy, smart-alecky din around this time—people were stricken, solemn, formal. Reverent without a focus. We really didn’t know how to act. We reached for what we could reach for.
In the middle of the next summer I got an email from Adinah. Hope you’re well and keeping out of trouble. I have a small request, she wrote. Like every Muslim who was able, she was called to make the hajj, the trip to Mecca. Some families from her mosque were going in February. Becky would take care of the dogs, the one thing she needed was permission. (She needed what?) I was still her legal husband. It was a simple consent form, I just had to sign, no big deal, she would send it to me. She was also short on money to pay for the trip, if I wanted to kick in, but that was up to me.
My first thought was: She’ll be killed. They would find out she was Jewish. She was out of her mind, this present-day Adinah, and the fact of that was extremely painful to me. A deluded fifty-two-year-old woman, walking right out into traffic, too helpless to live in this world.
“How would they know what she was born as?” Frances said. “Americans go on this thing all the time.”
Frances was just talking. I looked at my newspaper’s files online. I could find nothing at all about murders in Mecca. There hadn’t been any riots or bombs since the eighties, but the hajj did have a history of accidental stampedes. In 1990 there had been a rush inside a pedestrian tunnel between Mecca and Mina and 1,426 pilgrims had died. In some other years only a hundred or so were trampled. A few dozen had died this year from meningitis, and there were always deaths from heat prostration. And at the end of the hajj, there was a ritual sacrifice, a massive slaughter of sheep, goats, and cows, on behalf of the pilgrims. Most of the butchered flesh went to the poor, but how could a woman who hadn’t eaten meat since 1971 be up for this?
It gave me some degree of comfort that I could stop her. I could do that for her, at least, after all these years. Adinah, you don’t have a clue what you’re getting into, I wrote. Did you really think I or anyone with a brain would go along with this? It’s too insane. Sorry to be a party pooper, but that’s my opinion.
You think you’re saving me, don’t you? Adinah wrote back. What a full-of-yourself jerk you are. You have everything backward. This is why Muslims go around saying only God is God. Get over yourself, okay? Soon.
Frances said, “It’s bad enough she has to ask you—and you’re saying no? I don’t believe you.”
Frances was very chilly to me, and she meant it—I had appalled her—and work was no picnic that week either. I was with a reporter who was covering the case of a couple who’d beaten the woman’s four-year-old son to death. We interviewed the grandmother, the neighbors, the social worker, the usual, and I hated hearing the details. Some grisly bits were hard to forget. Even the reporter, a hard-boiled guy, was pretty quiet afterward. I was angry that these facts, true as they were, had entered me. The writer and I got drunk together standing at a bar, downing shots of whiskey, old-style city-desk guys.
That night I dreamed of Becky when she was maybe three, right after I first moved out, and she was pouncing on my back the way she used to when I read the paper at night. In my dream, I turned around and smacked her. As I once really had. In the dream, she was riding around on the back of a huge black dog, shrieking like a bird of prey in a horror movie, a vicious sound.
Frances was asleep next to me when I woke up, in murky terror. I thought, It’s too hard, I can’t stand it, though I couldn’t have said what that meant. What I really thought was, a person shouldn’t remember too much.
I stayed in the shower for a half hour the next morning, my version of all the ritual washing that religions go in for. I once saw a Muslim prayer room at an airport, where there was a spigot for ablutions. In the steam of the shower when I came out, I didn’t want to look in the mirror either. I hoped black coffee would help, and maybe it did.
I had a hangover all day, a bad one, and I kept thinking about Adinah, how she had every right to go to Mecca or wherever the hell she wanted, I’d known that all along. There wasn’t enough mercy in the world. Let her go, let her be one of those pilgrims in the baking sun. It was entirely like her to want such a thing. And millions of people went to Mecca every year and came home fine. Every year.
But I put off writing to her that I’d had a change of heart. I walked around with my heart as it was, unsightly and hidden. I had to work my butt off and run all over the city as usual, aiming my camera at suspects holding their jackets over their heads and lawyers acting earnest. All of this made me more infuriated with Adinah. She always thought she was above all this crap, too good to go near it. But she wanted a handout from me anyway, extra bucks for her voyage into the sky, which she couldn’t even afford.
I slept, I ate, I seeped into stoniness. It wasn’t so bad either. Frances ignored me. I didn’t care what she thought. I didn’t care about anything. My email had no more messages from Adinah—I was glad of that—but Becky wrote. Mom doesn’t even ask for anything and she’s saved all her money for this. What’s the matter with you? and I didn’t answer.
I might’ve walked around like that forever, not bothering with anything, but I stopped being good at it. I forgot one day when I walked onto a subway platform with Frances, and the ancient, loudmouth bum who hadn’t been there for a while was yelling, “Help the winos! Support your local wino! Remember the winos of New York!” This cracked me up, despite the many times I’d heard it before, and I saw that I missed being human. The bum said, “Hah, got a smile out of you,” a sentence I have always hated, and I didn’t even mind.
Okay, okay, I wrote to Adinah. Sorry for the delay.
Only Muslims are allowed to enter Mecca and Medina. Adinah had a paper from the imam of her mosque saying she was a real one, and a travel agent got her the visa. She’d never even had a passport before! And here she was, heading for Saudi Arabia, a pink-skinned middle-aged white lady who spoke nothing but English. She was training for the rigors, she said, by running a mile or so every day; dog-walking was good exercise but not that good. Becky reported her buying things to wear—a bunch of white cotton caftans and head scarves for the ritual walking, and a few blue ones (she always liked blue) for the rest of the time, since women had to be covered in public in Saudi Arabia. “She looks so weird in her abaya,” Becky said. “I can’t believe it’s Mom. Don’t tell her I said that.”
She was studying the prayers. Adinah said to me, “I’m so excited I can’t stand it.”
Hadn’t she had other excitements? What about the time we cracked the headboard during delirious, athletic sex? What about when Becky was born and Adinah couldn’t get over her really, really being our own girl? What about the day she thought I was dead in the World Trade Center and then I wasn’t?
Frances said, “It’s the whole city of God versus the city of man thing.”
The what?
“Oh, you know. Saint Augustine thought history was a running battle between the two. Heavenly beauty of purpose versus earthly preoccupations. Guess which was going to win in the end?”
“You’d think a person could live in both,” I said.
“Augie didn’t think so,” she said.
Frances knew quite a bit about saints, if you got her going, though she wasn’t a believer. She was temperamentally like me, nose to the grindstone of the here-and-now. How sensible we were, compared to that nut job Adinah.
And Becky, who had a perfectly good job assisting the editor of a knitting magazine, was going to take a two-week leave from it so she could walk one pack of dogs after another up and down the steep hills of San Francisco. Her mother (who hardly had a dime to her name) had to leave for the hajj free of debts and with her financial responsibilities covered. So her devoted daughter had to pick up dog poop while Adinah in her white robes glided off into the desert? Was that the way of it?
It was. I might have bought a ticket to California and just walked the dogs myself—I liked dogs, actually, and when I was a kid, my father was always going to get me one—or I might have paid someone to take Becky’s place—I could handle the amount, whatever it was, and wouldn’t that be financially handsome of me? I thought about both these things. Frances would’ve been horrified if I’d done either of them, but that wasn’t what stopped me. What stopped me was that it wasn’t like me. Skipping out on my job to lurch through the streets with a leash of panting mutts, mailing a large, unasked-for check to a woman I hadn’t slept with for more than two decades: not what I did.
I vowed that I would phone Becky often, to make sure she was okay and to get any news of Adinah. But I was in the middle of shooting a series about security guards in city schools, and I lost track of when the whole Mecca thing was, until I noticed stuff on the video monitors at work. Al Jazeera was broadcasting in English. “That’s my wife!” I said.
The whole room turned around to look at me. What we were watching, viewed from above, was a speckled mass, flecked white and gray, that was actually a sea of people, circling and pulsating around the giant black cube that was the Kaaba, the sacred site within the mosque. The spots of dark and light kept changing as the sea that was people kept moving, slow as a dream, stately, terrifying, constant.
My coworkers watching the monitor kept looking back at me to see if I was a Muslim and they’d never noticed. “She’s not really my wife,” I said.
They were ready to make wisecracks but I had scared them. I was busy thinking, Let her be okay. I had to wonder then who I was asking. The TV cut to an outside shot of the mosque, domes and minarets of gleaming pale stone, with more fields of humans pouring in. I stayed to watch, I had a horse in this race.
It occurred to me that the people winding around the Kaaba at the moment were really quite ordinary people. No better than I was, probably. But right now they were better. On TV a cheerful Punjabi pilgrim was showing the two pieces of regulation white cloth all the men wore—and what a pain it was to keep the top piece wrapped over your shoulder so you weren’t bare-chested. I would certainly look like a total idiot in that getup. I realized I was imagining myself in it.
In what life could I have ended up as a pilgrim? When could I have been someone who walked all that far, miles and miles, to visit innocence in the form of a place? Alongside me now by the video monitor the guys at work were yukking it up about the pilgrims’ white cloths. Easy to clean but not good for the office. I had the oddest feeling then—I was entirely glad that I’d known Adinah. As if I could wave to her from my side of the TV screen, Hi, girl. As if we were parts of the same body, as married couples dream of being, one shadow of us in the desert, another shadow in the newsroom. It was a very airy idea I had—and not one I could hold on to very long—but I kept it with me while I went about my business, while I did the job I knew how to do, I kept it all day and it was mine.