In the Walled Gardens (17 page)

I nodded.

“I’m not one of your husband’s closest friends, and he’s never confided in me. I mean, I don’t know what he does. Right? But
what if — anyway, even if he isn’t directly involved, it can get nasty. They could investigate his company. You know how it
is — they blame others for their own corruption. They want scarecrows to leave twisting in the wind.”

He sipped his Scotch, the ice clinking. He’d just put distance between the corrupt system and Houshang and himself quite nicely.

I smoked, my gaze fixed on the miniatures nailed to the wall. The studied poses of the robed women, turbaned men, uniform
gardens, the gold, astonishing colors. The figures shimmered. Their roles were cast for them, like their fate. Arrested. I
saw myself up there with them. Stylized. Paralyzed. Ornate and immured.

I felt I was suffocating. I went to open a French window, stepped out onto the terrace for air. Kavoos came out and stood
with me.

“What if he’s implicated?” he demanded. “Anything you suspect?”

“Nothing,” I said, lying so he would leave.

Kavoos was terrified for our good name and reputation, terrified for himself. Father had accumulated a lifetime of unimpeachable
deeds large and small, already shelved and forgotten, his ambition muffled with decorum and self-effacement. Today they laugh
at such modesty.

“What’s your gut feeling?” Kavoos asked me.

“Don’t worry,” I said.

“Don’t let on I’ve said anything. Wait until Houshang tells you.”

Kavoos stuck around, but I wanted him to go. He wanted more reassurance than I could give, and I wanted to be alone. I let
the help go home early and cooked and fed the children while they told me about their fistfight in school and detention at
the principal’s office. Then they watched
Morad Barghi
on television. I tucked them in. I briefly called Mother, who talked about her bulbs and bedding her plants.

In the dark stillness of the house, I turned on a light down-stairs, sat opposite the Persian miniatures. I saw their beauty,
minutely executed, constrained. The faces expressionless, one indistinguishable from the other. The tyranny of form. I’d never
seen them that way before. I heard the wind, the creaking of the shutters. I stared, trancelike. Then I saw them — the robed
men and women — rising out of their pages, propelling themselves. Casting off their mantles, their eternal strictures, millennial
and crippling. Tearing off their configurations — the ceremonial robes, the eternal words, the props. Flinging themselves
out of the impossible geometry of their pavilions and courts and gardens. Into an unpredictable future.

I
MUST HAVE BEEN DOZING
when a door slammed. Then I heard another door and flushing in the downstairs powder room. Two-thirty. Houshang had stopped
off somewhere after the official reception. I heard him come up the steps, taking the treads slowly — he’d had too much to
drink again. I imagined my sons taunted in school because their father’s name was denounced in the papers. Big headlines,
a picture.

I lifted my head from the pillow and listened. Houshang knew better than to get caught. He knew better than to get himself
implicated; he didn’t want anyone’s advice or opinion. He needed to come out on top, for himself, for the money, the sheer
pleasure. Testing that fine line between big success and corruption — a populated line, judging by prevailing standards. I
had no idea about the intricacies of his dealings.

He came down the hall, turned off the light, going into our bathroom through the hallway. He flicked the switch, light seeping
from under the adjoining door into the bedroom, an incandescent strip adhering to the dark. I could hear him move in there.
He picked off his shoes, let them fall with a thud. His belt buckle struck the tiled floor, then dragged. He turned on the
faucet, brushed his teeth, rinsed, hitting the toothbrush against the sink four successive times. I heard the vanity mirror
slide back and forth, then the faucet again, water rushing into a glass. He was drinking. He needed pills for a headache,
pills for his stomach, pills to go to sleep. I turned toward the window, my back to the door through which he’d come.

When had I started disliking him? The first time I’d seen him. But I hadn’t noticed then.

Long ago suddenly. Fourteen years. I had just returned from London with a fine degree and the finest prospects, Mother said.
I had wanted to choose my fate, whereas Mother believed one could not escape it. She thought deliberating endlessly about
marriage vulgar and lacking in imagination; I thought it pride equivocating with emotion and logic. So I had started life
by getting married. Houshang had stalked me. He wanted me all for himself. I had evaded him, knowing he would finally have
me and I couldn’t escape him. He was nine years older, charming, persistent. Whispering, “You’re my paragon of goodness.”
He brought his family to ask for my hand. His mother, hair-sprayed to perfection, fingered her jewels, adoring him. Mother
mimicking her later. His father, a noted surgeon and sometime politician, was more discerning. His mother was a member of
a royal charity and changed the color of her gems and expensive suits with the days of the month. Our families started seeing
a great deal more of each other. His father soliciting Father’s advice in the corners of living rooms and on evening walks,
which pleased Father no end. The mother cogitating about high society in her high trill, which amused and exasperated Mother.
Mother’s ironic quips way above her head. We had a short engagement. Forty-five people at his parents’ in Mahmoudieh, then
eighty-five people at the Hotel Darband for dinner and dancing. Well-attended luncheons, elegant afternoon teas, dinner at
La Résidence, Friday lunches of
chelo-kabob
at their country house by the Karaj River, followed by interminable games of rummy and poker.

Father and Mother had considered others but agreed to Houshang. He looked promising, he had luster, zeal, drive. “That’s fine!”
Mother said. Father had smiled, but that had had more to do with the vision of his one and only daughter in a white lace dress.
Summer. A wedding in the garden of the old house. The fragrant rose bowers in full bloom and the night dark velvet. The massive
trees lit like phantoms, the pool shimmering from the light of paper lanterns. The largest rugs cast over fine-graveled paths,
with the music of the orchestra rising and children running across the lawns like fireflies. Mother’s friend the portly Mrs.
Vahaab singing that night like a large-bosomed nightingale. Pots of white jasmine and red geranium set all around the front
porch and down the steps. Old Tourandokht — old even then — in a brand-new blue satin dress and diaphanous voile chador, crying
under the Russian crystal chandelier. Watching me turn in the downstairs hallway, lifting up my white veil with one hand.
The bride.
“Aroos khanom, aroos khanom!”
she kept repeating, snapping her fingers in a lop-sided dance with her funny bowed legs. Murmuring prayers and blowing on
me to ward off the evil eye. In the upstairs rooms, she had burned wild rue, carrying it in a small brazier on a silver tray,
circling through the rooms to ward off evil spirits, and we had inhaled the mesmerizing scent in our frenzied state while
applying French makeup and perfumes. And she had come close and whispered to me, “May you grow old with your husband. May
you have capable sons and beautiful daughters. May you live together for a hundred years.” And I’d known then as the gates
were closing that revenge would come. I’d seen myself pass before the bedroom mirror, shimmering in white, and knew even as
I prepared to descend the stairs that I was relinquishing a certain instinct, that deeper rhythm of life, for certainty and
logic. Doing what was expected. Drawn deep into a system, easing into it as though slipping on gloves for a formal and inevitable
occasion. Already waiting for the end. Houshang and I virtual strangers, despite our all-consuming social calendar. Always
with others, barely knowing each other. “What’s to know? What’s to know?” Mother kept repeating as we descended the jasmine-lined
steps of the front terrace before all the wedding guests. “You’ll never know until you live with him three dozen years. Even
then.”

I heard the bathroom door open and his footsteps on the carpet. He sat on the edge of the bed, then slumped back. I stiffened
without moving, my back to him. I closed my eyes. The boys were still young; I had obligations. Houshang possessed. He liked
being in that position. Anything else was losing.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Houshang was gone by the time I went in to shower. He was avoiding me. As usual his clothes from the night before were in
a heap by the chair. As I lifted his blue shirt to put it in the hamper, I caught a whiff of perfume. The shirt I’d given
him that summer. He liked blue, the finest shirts from Paris, but that wasn’t my perfume on his favorite shirt. He’d been
out drinking and picking up women. He went, always accompanied.

I called Pouran and woke her up. She said it was just as well, since her masseuse would be there any minute to wrap her flesh
in her eternal fight against cellulite. I told her I was dropping in on my way to work.

She lived four minutes away. The new Filipino maid opened the front door. She’d been over at our house with Pouran’s two brats
and knew Houshang and the children. I asked if there had been a party the night before, and she mumbled about a group of friends
and card games.

“Like other nights, madame,” she said.

Across the hallway, two Bangladeshi servants — new arrivals — were in the living room dusting and vacuuming. Pouran had sacked
all the local house help, as she’d pledged, and imported. “Our masses stink!” she always says, grimacing.

“When my husband was here last night, did he leave his jacket?” I asked.

“No, no jacket, madame.”

That settled it. I went upstairs. Pouran was in the bedroom, seated at her gilt rococo dressing table, a half-dozen pairs
of expensive shoes strewed by her feet. Her yellow hair was disheveled, the black roots out. She looked wasted first thing
in the morning, her vulgar sexuality in remission. She was in an apricot peignoir, applying greasy cream to her yellowish
skin and yawning nonstop.

“I was going to call you,” she said.

“About last night’s party?”

She registered surprise but recovered admirably.

“Houshang was here,” I said.

“We missed you!”

“Of course you did. Did he take off with Iraj at any point?”

“Iraj had guests!”

“That’s nice. So you supply the liquor and women.”

“What?” said Pouran, indignant. “We played poker until late.”

“My husband never whores around alone. Neither does yours, of course. They go together. Don’t bother — I know.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Men must be men. You understand that! Houshang was tired and just had a couple of drinks an —”

“Did any of your guests need a ride?”

“What do you mean?”

“You” — I pointed — “know perfectly well what I mean. I know what’s going on behind my back. I’m warning you. Don’t you dare
pimp for my husband. You understand?”

“How dare you insult me like that!” she said, all haggard and slovenly.

She went on about how she was shocked at my odd behavior, how I’d come barging in, how much I had changed. I had always been
such a perfect lady! I left her as the masseuse came in, a stocky Maronite from Beirut with bulges and porcelain skin and
bedroom eyes.

“Bonjour, mesdames!”
she chirped, lugging her bag of potions.

It took forever to drive to work, traffic gnarled, downtown a hundred times worse.

Iraj and Pouran’s first and only allegiance is to Houshang. They will always lie for him. Iraj and Pouran keep a permanent
state of open house. They live off others, seemingly living for them. Their friends congratulate them for this. It’s a perfect
arrangement. Theirs, the grand central station, the clearinghouse, the private boudoir and drawing room for all seasons, where
Iraj can play host and Pouran can fritter away her life publicly. My husband and Iraj and Pouran were three of a kind, tight
like a fist. I had always been the odd one out. Every time we’d done anything, from the very beginning of our marriage, Iraj
and Pouran had tagged along. To Cannes, Florence, the Greek isles. Houshang needed them, and whenever I objected he called
me a snob. Iraj was the invaluable old friend and ally; they did business together. Pouran was scrupulous at leaving a very
good impression on her husband and mine, her affair with Thierry another one of her backroom forays. She doesn’t know I know.
She’ll never understand foreigners have big mouths and short attention spans. Iraj is so full of himself that he doesn’t notice
her carnal incursions, or perhaps it helps business. He’s a developer on a grand scale, speculating in land and building high-rises
and hotels and offices in Tehran and around the country. With homes in London and the south of France and New York. Pouran
impersonates the role of dutiful wife, plopping herself forever center stage as hostess. Admittedly she’s perfected the role
— the dulcet voice, the gushing warmth, the fortitude of an all-terrain tank for pushy hospitality. All the while catering
to her husband’s hubris as though it were some hothouse flower guaranteed to stand her in good stead, which it does. She lives
like a queen, but she’s restless. The last time she was in a frenzy was over the cultural attaché of a certain embassy — diplomats,
not bankers, the ultimate conquest to her. I was acquainted with the attaché. Who wasn’t? He was slim and tall, and he had
a bit of a stoop and silky hair collapsing into impish eyes, with a degree from Oxford and aristocratic bloodlines and all
the markings of the European degenerate. An incurable collector — ancient glazed pottery and rugs and kilims and tribal silver
and Eastern knickknacks — he shopped along Manuchehri Street every week like a fox. A friend said he was a spy. I was there
the evening of that swank cocktail party in a garden in Niavaran — Iraj roving with his tycoon comportment and come-get-me
look, Pouran all dolled up and on the lookout, stepping out of their chauffeured gold Mercedes-Benz with the starry-eyed look
of some of our new mercantile imperialists. She’d caught the cultural attaché bored out of his mind, slumped in the armchair
of the deserted living room. He’d attached himself to her on the spot. The local girls were too girlish for his tastes, too
prudish for his pornographic requirements. He told me himself, taking great pride in his indiscretion. Pouran took pride in
their lecherous afternoons knocking about the antique wares in his apartment off Ghavam Saltaneh, delighted with his great
breeding, the cultural part completely wasted on her. He told me, with considerable condescension. “God, you’ve got
such
great breeding!” he’d say, mimicking her. “It’s
such
an honor!” Laughing his head off. Not that she ever knew. The last time I saw him, he said with amusement, “She likes giving
juicy tidbits to the right customer. She’ll do anything! The husband gets foreign concessions. Both of them awful people.”