American Music (14 page)

It was the same dream he had fallen into when he met Vivian at the dock, the same fantasy that they could live apart, from the world, from consequences, from Pearl. Like two ships floating in the lenses of a woman’s sunglasses. He had been so young. He had been so stupid. He did not regret falling in love with Vivian and he did not regret what they had made of their love. It was a kind of miracle that he was now able to be a father and that their love had resulted in this tender gift for Pearl. But the gift came with so much sadness that he was not always sure that it was worth it. For him, it was worth it. For Pearl, it was worth it. But what about the girl? Joe was not an intellectual and he was not a philosopher but he had become a thinker and the love he had for his daughter led him to thoughts that he would much rather have not had. He no longer experienced the pain he felt that night at Vivian’s bedside, he would never let himself feel that again, but his punishment was to be someone who would think and think and think. His mind was a river, and its contents were as green and deep and severe as his daughter’s eyes.

He turned up his collar to the wind. He kept walking. His thoughts rushed on, taking him places that he did not want to go. He thought about the future and what his actions would bring in the world. He wanted his daughter’s happiness more than anything but he saw that she was not destined primarily for happiness. She was too complicated for happiness. And he wondered what kind of mother she would be, and if he ever lived to see his grandchildren what kind of happiness they might know. He felt a pain in his chest. He slowed down. He stopped at a stretch of railing and leaned over and caught his breath. The wind pushed his collar and hair leftward and he had the sensation of leaning over the railing on the deck of an ocean liner many years ago. In the memory he was holding a newspaper and he had folded it into quarters to stop it from flapping in the wind. A notice in the lower right-hand corner of the page caught his eye. It was an advertisement announcing that Count Basie would be making his New York debut on Christmas Eve at the Roseland Ballroom. He remembered reading that and looking out over the sea with anticipation and hope. The ocean that day was navy blue and sparkling with handfuls of diamonds thrown from the sun. The jewels seemed to jump up into the clear air and then alight back on the surface of the water like delicate mystical insects. He thought that this is what life would be: fresh and free and filled with light. But then he thought about returning to law school and he loosened his grip on the paper and the wind stirred up and then the pages flew from his hands. They contorted themselves in various positions of torment as they clutched the railing before breaking free and flying, jerking and buckling and sailing above the water, and then fluttering down to the sea.

That was then, he thought, before Vivian, before Iris, before the war. Everything felt so different now, from the way women wore their clothes with those big shoulders and dramatic hats to the music that people played, swing having long since been left behind by serious musicians. Time swung, he thought, even if the music didn’t anymore. He marveled at the way the wind blowing a certain direction could make him feel more than a decade younger and bring him the sensation that he was gazing out at a bright future. The future hadn’t turned out too bad, he reasoned. He loved his devoted wife, his beautiful, complicated daughter, his gorgeous suffering cracked and ever-changing city. No, the future wasn’t too terrible, he thought. It just didn’t really feel like the future anymore.

Iris

The light in the kitchen was dim and silvery blue. Iris was cleaning up the dishes with Pearl when the call came about Joe. He had stayed late at the office. Is your mother home? a voice asked.

She worried that it was something about school. She was fifteen and didn’t much like anything but art class although schoolwork came easily to her and she got good grades. Still, her deportment was a problem. She had refused to file her nails for hygiene class. She had said she would prefer to cut them and this defiance had earned her first detention and then a D. She hoped it wasn’t that beastly woman calling about some other failure to behave. She liked to wear jeans with the cuffs rolled up. She studied, but she liked the boys who listened to the radio. The teachers noticed things like that. But then she saw Pearl wipe her hands a second time on her apron even though they were dry and tilt her head down and put her hand on the back of the wooden chair and, swaying, move her body into the seat. She pressed the phone to her head as if she were trying to receive a message from a distant planet. Pearl repeated what was being said to her and as she softly mouthed the words Iris’s thoughts shattered inside her head. Suddenly the world was trying to reorganize itself and she realized that she would be left with the wrong parent. She loved Pearl but it was for her father that she lived. She felt the truth of this the moment her mother hung up the phone, that there had been a terrible misunderstanding. Your father’s had a heart attack, Pearl said, trying to be gentle but sounding to Iris redundant and cold. When her mother left for the morgue Iris refused to go and she did not come out of her room for two days. They had not found Joe until he had already been dead for three hours, and during those two days in her room Iris replayed in her mind everything she had done while he was already gone. She had done her homework. She had listened to the radio. She had eaten dinner with her mother. She tried to tell herself that now everything she did would be like that: she would be doing it while he was no longer alive. If she could go back to not knowing that he was not alive everything might be okay. This was when her fifteen-year-old brain began to blame her mother for having ever picked up the phone. It was several years later that she would find in her father’s file cabinets her original birth certificate.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Honor and Milo

T
hey were driving very fast now. Signs sped past in an imaginary window: Bon Vivant Diner, Used Books, Open Twenty-four Hours. Then they drove straight through the city out onto the road. They were giving themselves over to the highway. Honor had an image of herself and Milo at that moment and they looked to her like a soldier and an angel making love in the backseat of a speeding car. The angel’s wings brushed the inside roof of the car and one feathery white tip, gray with soot and exhaust, stuck out the window. The soldier’s boots pressed one against the door and the other against the seat and made a rip in the worn vinyl. In this image of herself and Milo, Honor could not tell which one of them was the angel and which one of them was the soldier.

Pearl

Pearl struggled through the blowing sand and occasionally reached for Anna’s arm to steady herself. She was absorbed by the task of walking through the desert and could not yet take in her surroundings. Later, when she thought about the last time she had seen her granddaughter and great-grandchild she wished that she had spent more time looking at the girls’ faces and less time looking at the sand. The experience of being with Anna in that place again had been overwhelming and unreal and she sometimes wondered if she had actually been there.

The wind had died down and the sand had settled. They reached the top of the dune, where there were two beach chairs waiting for them. Pearl gingerly lowered herself into one of the tiny chairs. She felt a chill although the air was blisteringly hot; she remembered this hot dry weather. The desert stretched out before them but instead of a blank expanse it was strewn with people working and equipment and what looked to her like debris but which in fact was an array of artifacts. A different kind of debris, she thought to herself. She sat atop this mound of sand and was put in mind of generals looking down on a battlefield. Or a director overseeing a film set, she thought, and smiled. She remembered Mr. DeMille and the way he had screeched into his megaphone and stood there silhouetted against the sun like some kind of exotic desert cactus that made noise. If she closed her eyes she could see the Gate of Ramses II and her small self walking under its enormous archway.

She opened her eyes. There stood the very same archway, in the distance, chipped and broken and slanted but standing up in the desert. And all around were vestiges of
The Ten Commandments:
goblets, chariots, artificial stones. When Anna had told her that her boyfriend was an archaeologist Pearl had imagined the uncovering of ancient tombs and undiscovered hieroglyphs. It seemed like a vaguely noble line of work. But this.

She had been polite about it, and genuinely amazed by the coincidence. Anna hadn’t known that her grandmother had worked in film, let alone on the set of this film, and so when she told Pearl that Rob was on a dig in California unearthing an old film set and then said what film it was she had been stunned to hear her grandmother burst out laughing. Pearl was not someone who regularly burst out laughing. It was a short burst. And then Anna had spontaneously suggested that they go out west together to visit the dig. She had never traveled with Pearl and it seemed an unlikely thing to do, but Anna was at that point in her life up for anything, and besides, she had a young child to look after and perhaps Pearl could help. This was unlikely, since Pearl was now in her eighties, but Anna was still, always, expecting everything to turn out in her favor. So she was not really surprised when Pearl agreed to go. Iris thought it was a terrible idea, but this only strengthened both Pearl’s and Anna’s resolve.

The sun was starting to set and the sky was shimmering with heat. The little girl, Honor, played in the sand. Her hat had fallen off and Pearl thought of mentioning this to Anna but she was careful not to seem a busybody. It was enough that Anna had remembered a hat, she thought; the girl was still in college. The fact of the child had been absorbed, but nevertheless she worried about Anna’s prospects. A single mother. This boyfriend digging for silly props in what was essentially the outskirts of Los Angeles. It was absurd the lengths to which people went to take the movies seriously. She had long ago stopped caring about the movies. She still went, but there was no such thing as glamour to her anymore. Her head was throbbing from the heat, and her vision seemed to be blurring at the edges, but she didn’t say anything about it.

Anna asked her questions about her job on the film. What had she done as a wardrobe girl? Was this really where she had met her husband, the grandfather whom Anna had never known? The little girl kept sifting the sand and talking quietly to herself. The sun sank a millimeter lower and the whole sky changed, softening, and the heat lifted a little. Anna stopped asking questions. The workers continued their busy activity in the distance. Pearl settled back into the beach chair. Her head throbbed and the scene before her began to pulse and waver in the heat. She felt faint but she didn’t want to trouble Anna. She experienced a dull jolt in the side of her skull like she was bumping her head in a dream and then she knew that she had drifted to someplace unreal. She would stay there, she thought. Just for a moment. Nobody else had to know.

A figure came walking toward them across the sand. It appeared to be a man. Pearl was aware that he had been summoned from her imagination but she did not want to send him back. He was tall and olive-skinned and he was wearing a suit. It was hot for a suit, most of the people working down in the field were wearing T-shirts and jeans, but somehow he did not look strange to Pearl. He approached. As he came closer Pearl tilted her head with curiosity and then stared intently at him.

Do you remember me? he said.

I think I do, Pearl said.

Solomon Eckstein, he said, and held out his hand.

She leaned forward in her little chair and he lifted his other hand and said Don’t get up and he knelt down in front of her on one knee and shook her hand. It seemed for a moment like he was going to kiss her hand but he just kept holding it. He held it the whole time they talked.

This is incredible, isn’t it, he said.

She thought he was talking about the dig and she said: Who would have imagined that they would have considered this something worth digging up!

No, he said, I meant seeing you again.

Oh, that, she said. She half smiled sweetly and looked off to the side. Well yes, it is incredible.

But it seems right, he said. He looked into her eyes.

Yes, she said, it does.

So, he said, switching his legs and still kneeling, what happened to you? I looked for you when I got out of the infirmary but you were gone.

I went east to start my life, she said, brightly.

How did it go? he said. Your life.

She shifted in her seat and drew her knees in closer. She was aware that her walking sneakers had filled with sand.

It was full, she said. I have a great-granddaughter. She gestured toward Anna and Honor who were burying each other’s hands and feet in the sand a little ways away.

That’s wonderful, he said.

The sun was setting fully now, sending deep colors, pinks and mauves and oranges and greens, across the sky and the colors seemed to be radiating out from Solomon’s head. He looked to Pearl a bit like a religious figure in one of those paintings on black velvet. He was ridiculous and beautiful and she was grateful to him although she couldn’t quite remember for what.

I had a family too.

I’m glad.

But I always wondered about you. It’s good to see you again.

It’s good to see you too, she said.

He held her hand and looked into her eyes for a long time. His eyes were green. Her daughter’s eyes were green. That was funny.

He squeezed her hand and stood up and shook the sand from his pants.

Well, he said, I have to go now.

I should be going too, she said. She did not move.

Thank you for everything, he said. And good luck with your family.

You too, she said. Thank you for saying hello.

When Anna came walking back over with Honor, Pearl was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Her hand was thin and veined and trembling.

From the speeding car Honor watched herself walk across the desert with Anna and Pearl. Her hat fell off and stayed in the sand as they walked away. She thought: I know now who those people are. She didn’t feel anger or sadness or forgiveness or compassion. She just took in the scene and thought: That is the way it was.

She leaned down and kissed Milo and she felt a peace in not having to imagine anymore. Trouble starts, she thought, when we take the symbol for reality. It was a line she must have read in some book Sam had given her. She didn’t have to do that anymore, take the symbol for reality.

She saw the three figures walk into the desert and she watched them out the window and she knew for the first time that she had not been letting them go and then the car drove on and she let them go.

That night, in the motel, Honor fell asleep exhausted, still in her clothes, on the second bed. Her face a bright light against the dark maroon bedspread. Her mother marveled at the openness of the child: her mouth wide, her hands upturned, her splayed limbs like disheveled clothes.

Anna was still so young and yet she never slept with her palms open, always curled herself into a ball. If there was one thing she could give her daughter it would be this: to stay open. It would not be an inherited trait, she thought, putting down her toothbrush and turning off the light in the bathroom. Then she crawled into the other bed beside Pearl. It was dark now.

Hi, darling, Pearl said.

Hi, Grandma, she said.

They lay next to each other in the plain room. There was a humming from a generator and lights from the parking lot outside beamed through the drapes and swept across the walls every now and then. They lit up the blank TV screen, the low dresser, the beige wallpaper.

Do you ever regret coming east and leaving the movies? Anna asked.

No, I don’t, Pearl said. She was looking straight up with her eyes open. Anna, already falling asleep, couldn’t see the tears. If things hadn’t happened exactly the way they did, she said, I would never have been here with you.

Milo was also letting go. He could tell that he had given her something and in doing this for her he felt a pressure like the weight of a body, a dead weight, rising from his chest. She looked down on him and she saw the light coming from his face and she felt his ribs nearly burst apart and his arms spread out to receive her and she knew now that it had been she who was the soldier and she saw that he was the angel.

He talked to her in his sleep for the last time. He said they drowned him in the river. He said they came for him in the darkness and they didn’t look at him because they knew him.

Who, she said, who are you now?

My name is Parvin, he said.

He said they put a sack over her head and they tied the sack and then they lowered her into a boat. They took another boat and pulled the second boat along behind them and paddled out into the Bosphorous at night. Through a hole in the burlap she could see the stars wobbling on the surface of the water. When they reached far enough they stopped paddling and then they tilted the second boat. When she fell she fell fast and a million bubbles burst around her in an explosion of phosphorescent light.

At the bottom of the river there were hundreds of us, he said, swaying upright like underwater tombstones.

He said this is what they did to the disobedient.

Parvin looked up through the tiny holes in the burlap and saw the shadowy undersides of the two boats slide away on the surface of the water. For a moment, she expected to die there and decided to breathe the water. But then she changed her mind and decided not to die. She had no idea how she would accomplish this, but when she pushed her hands above her head she discovered that the string tying the sack had begun to loosen. She wriggled her hands through the loosening knot and then they emerged through the top of the sack. She wriggled and the sack sunk down to her feet. She appeared to be dancing underwater. Her black hair wafted weightlessly, like ink. It scrawled mad writing behind her as she swam up to the surface for air. She had no time to waste and she swam frantically, but always elegantly, to the far side of the river. There were times when she thought she was too tired to go on, but then she thought of Hyacinth and found strength and continued on.

Still, she could not understand why he had let her be taken away and drowned. He had handed her over to the men who put her in the sack. She had been too confused at the time to feel the full force of this betrayal, but she comforted herself now with the thought that he had done it as part of a ruse, that he had known that the string would disentangle. She could not go on swimming unless she believed this. She could not believe anything else.

What she did not know as she swam was that Hyacinth had given the men the string and that the string had been given to him the night before by Avedis. She did not know until later that during his experiments Avedis had created a rope that looked strong and invincible but which in fact would loosen and dissolve in water. She did not know that Avedis had called for Hyacinth in secret and had given him this string to rescue her from the Sultan. She did not know that Avedis had done this because he loved her and because he knew that she loved Hyacinth.

As she approached the shore she grew weak. The dark water began to lap into her mouth and she could not prevent herself from swallowing it first in sips and then in mouthfuls and then in great and deadly gulps. The land was a dark green mirage that kept slipping up and down, in and out of the water, in and out of her reach. Suddenly she felt that she might die here in the water.

She kept thinking of the last time she had seen Hyacinth, when he handed her over to her murderers. He was standing very still and she could tell now as her head lifted and sunk that he had been frozen with the terror of losing her.