I picked up Mary-Emma. With a clean wipe I dabbed at some chocolate near her mouth. “Go hug your mama,” I said, putting her back down and sending her dashing into the kitchen to interrupt them.
I called “Good night” and slipped out the door. Out of politeness I left quickly to go live my life. I had not ridden my Suzuki but still put my hair in a scarf, as if I had. I was a sharmoota, with a hijab tied not properly, under the chin, but — a concession, the middle ground — behind, at the nape of my neck, like Grace Kelly in The Country Girl. Or was it Rear Window? I walked and walked and then, as in my recurrent dreams where I was flying but only a few inches off the ground, unambitiously but still airborne, I began slightly to run. On my way, I broke off a blossoming stem from a neighbor’s crab-apple tree and through the moist April night I made a brisk, hot beeline toward Reynaldo’s. I would put the stem in water when I got to his place.
But when I got there something was wrong. There was no light coming from his windows. I climbed the stairs and tapped on his door. Uneasiness coursed through me, and finding the door unlocked, I slowly turned the knob and went in. I found him sitting in what had become an emptied darkened apartment, in the middle of the floor, with his laptop blazing its light up at him. It reminded me of the aluminum foil we would put on my mother’s old album covers in order to catch the sun in summer and burn the pallor from our faces. All the other furnishings were gone. Everything — the bed, the xylophone, the table. On the wall was a single poster, white letters on black: A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but a laughter more terrible than any sadness … I knew it was from the opening page of White Fang, a book I had read in seventh grade. I had never seen this hanging in his room before, though maybe now it simply stood out, being the only thing there besides Reynaldo himself and his laptop. He slammed the laptop cover down and looked up at me, or at least toward me. He was sitting on his prayer rug, which was facing east. I remember when I had thought it was a yoga mat, like my brother’s. I kicked off my shoes at the door, as he sometimes liked me to do, but I was not relaxed: my jackhammering heart was rising to my throat. The thought occurred to me that so much vibration might loosen my fillings.
“Hello,” he said, unsmilingly and as if from a great bleak distance. He flashed the light from a key chain my way, then lay it on the floor where it was our only illumination. He glanced at my face and then away. There was a cup of tea on the floor beside him, and he picked it up and drank from it while looking at the wall. I had seen this exact same expression and movement before — where? (Edward. I’d seen it in him the very first day I met him.) In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love — the death of a man’s trying. It read as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper. There was the sacredness, immersion, intrusion, and violence to the ordinary that preceded romantic love, and then there was Haughty Fatigue, the stripper, who stole it away.
“What’s going on?” I asked. There was nothing to put the crab-apple branch in or on, and so I just stood there holding it. In its droop I could see it already beginning to fail, an aspect of flowers I had studied in paintings of them.
“I’m moving to London,” he said. “I’ve had the xylophone sent to your apartment. It should show up there in a few days. Mary-Emma can play it there. And you, too, of course.”
Was the Jack London poster a clue? A code? Everything had grown strange. Things between us were dissolving like an ice cube in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared. Thus would the whole world end, I’d been told.
“I’m not part of a cell,” he said.
“That never crossed my mind.” Though now it did. He had accepted some assignment. That must have been it. There was some manipulative mullah in his life — rumors abounded of quiet recruitment everywhere, though these were whispered and sometimes whispered as jokes. “Why London?”
“The English are simultaneously critical and stiffly uncomplaining — a stage Americans bypassed altogether, having gone from a dullard’s stoicism to a neurotic’s whining in less than half a century.”
“That is such a bullshit answer.”
“I’m part of an Islamic charity for Afghan children. That is all. They think I’m part of a cell. I’m not. If anyone asks you, if they question you when I’m gone, please tell them that I’m not.”
There was no room in this conversation for “What about us?” The conversational space had suddenly filled with other creatures. Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
“You are Brazilian. What kind of cell would you be part of? A bikini wax cell?” I had once found a copy of a lingerie catalog in his pile of newspapers. When I picked it up and looked closely, the address label bore my own name. On one of the few occasions I’d had him over he had apparently taken it from my apartment, unbeknownst to me, perhaps to look at the bosomy models. Now that he was apparently leaving for London, all kinds of things I had refused to think about for very long came blowing back as if by dusty gusts aimed to tear up the eyes.
“I’m not Brazilian.”
“You’re not?” Of course he wasn’t. Why hadn’t I figured that out? Where were the bossa novas? Why did he not know a single phrase of “The Girl from Ipanema”?
“About that I lied.”
“Why? Where are you from?” Perhaps he would turn out to know the words to “Kashmiri Love Song,” my favorite song by Rudolph Valentino. My hands were truly pale! Even if he did not love them by the Shalimar. My heart tapped against my chest like fingers on a tabletop.
“Hoboken, New Jersey.”
“Hoboken? Like Frank Sinatra?”
He snickered a little, a look of hard pedantry in his eyes. “Even the very first revolution in America was conducted from New Jersey.”
“Gambling and disease. Right from the start. Are we doing American history?” I looked at his familiar and beautiful face. He was leaving me as mysteriously as he had first appeared. An agony. The exit like the entrance — but reversed. A palindrome: gut-tug.
“You are an innocent girl — though you are not pure. But still, I believe you are innocent. Especially for a Jew. That is good.”
“A Jew?”
“Yes.” This pronouncing voice did not sound like him, and he could see that I could hear that and seemed to give me a small, quick breaking-character smile meant to slip out and be received by me beneath this script of departure.
“That means you aren’t going to tell me anything more, are you.” I began to twist the bottom hem of my T-shirt into a coil. In life, as in movies, one sometimes could mistake a robot for a living being. “What’s happened to your voice? You’re speaking without contractions. How can you be from New Jersey?”
“When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. You will feel you have a kind of wisdom, very mistaken, but a mistake of some power to you and so you will sadly treasure it and grow it.”
“How about if I first just find out who you are.” I had been the minibar — and not the minbar — in this temporary room of lodging. It was BYOB and I had brought the beer. “You are a haddi: some sort of jihadist.”
“It is not the jihad that is the wrong thing. It is the wrong things that are the wrong things.”