Dinaw Mengestu - How to Read the Air

“How was it?” she asked.

“It was wonderful,” I told her. “I’ll tell you why as soon as we get back home.”

Angela and I picked up dinner from the last takeout Puerto Rican restaurant left on our block. There had once been, or so we were told, close to a half-dozen such places in the neighborhood, a fact conveyed to us with great, passionate interest by one of the few remaining longtime tenants of our building, an old, semi-decrepit woman who had otherwise never had anything to say to us. Unlike Angela, who took the news as further proof of a widespread cultural loss happening throughout New York, I considered the disappearance of such places entirely irrelevant, given that something similar could be said of almost any block in this corner of the city, where change was not only constant but inevitable, and without which one could imagine the buildings and the trees that stood facing them slowly withering, as if it was the relentless process of renewal that had kept them standing in the first place.

On our walk back, with our plastic bag of food tucked under my arm, Angela asked me what had been so wonderful about my day. We were only three blocks away from the intersection where we had met. If ever there was a perfect place and time to reinvent oneself, this was most likely it. On some days it seemed as if half the tenements surrounding us were being taken down and replaced with something new that, at least on the surface, promised to be significantly better.

“I had a meeting with the dean this afternoon,” I told her. “After my class was over. He called me into his office and said he wanted to talk about my future at the school. I thought he was going to fire me at first. I can’t remember the last time we talked in his office, maybe two years ago when one of my students had their parents complain about their grade. He asked me if I was happy with my class, and I told him yes, I was happy, but I wanted to do more. He said that’s what he wanted to talk to me about. One of the other English teachers is retiring after the semester, and the dean told me that they wanted me to teach his classes. He already talked it over with the faculty committee and the board. They all agreed that I’d be perfect. It would be full-time, and after two years I would have tenure. He said my salary by then would more than double.

“As he told me that, though, I was thinking about what you had said once about this being just a temporary job, and how I was supposed to go on someday to get my Ph.D. That was always the plan but somehow I forgot that. I became so concerned about just holding on to what we had that I didn’t want to take any chances. For so long I lived on almost nothing and I was afraid of going back to that. It’s been three years now, and look at us, we’re worse off than before. We hardly talk anymore, and I know I’m to blame for that. I didn’t want to hear that you were unhappy, and so I did what I did best: I ignored it. I just kept hoping that with time it would eventually pass.

“I told the dean that I would take the job, but only for one more semester because after that I was going to go to graduate school. He said he thought it was a great idea — something I should definitely do, and that when it came time to apply he’d offer me his full support.”

I spoke with the conviction of a man who believed every word he said. I could picture the conversation with the dean as if it had actually happened — and had Angela asked me to describe the scene I could have told her in great detail about how he and I had sat together in his wood-paneled office with the arched windows that looked out onto the edge of Central Park after the last bell of the day had rung and most of the students had departed; however imagined that conversation may have been, the effect was nonetheless real. I was going to move forward in life.

Angela, a skeptic at heart, tried to remain unaffected. I thought, If she’s ever had an addict in her life, this is what he must have sounded like. Always this promise of renewal. I figured somewhere in that past of hers, between uncles, cousins, and her mother’s boyfriends, she must have; the fact that she was grinding down hard on her teeth while blinking rapidly all but confirmed that.

When she finally spoke all she said was, “I’m happy to hear that, Jonas. Happy for you and maybe even for us.”

Later that evening, while we were sitting at the table over a half-eaten plate of paella and plantains, we talked about numbers and the things we would like to have someday, nothing lavish this time — we had learned that lesson already — a few extra square feet of living space, more sunlight, and a vacation or two out of the city.

“Let’s be conservative,” Angela said, “and say that your pay doubles. We’d have enough extra money, after everything is paid, to get a better place. Something that doesn’t feel like a basement.”

That was the extent of her wishful thinking.

The next day at the academy I continued from where I had left off. The only interruption to the story was when I told my students at the start of class that they could put their anthologies and notebooks away. “We won’t be needing them for now,” I said. I didn’t bother to notice whether any of them looked at me surprised.

“My father’s first job at the port,” I began, “was bringing tea to the dock workers, a job for which he was paid only in tips — a few cents here and there that gradually added up. On an average day he would serve anywhere between three and five hundred cups of tea. He could carry as many as ten at a time on a large wooden platter that he learned to balance on his forearm. He always had to be alert while doing so in case someone tried to steal the tray from him, or knock him over as a joke because he was clearly a foreigner and could speak only a few words of Arabic. He learned to tie a piece of cloth around his forehead to keep the sweat from dripping into his eyes as he walked. He had never had steady hands before. As a child he had been clumsy; his father would often yell at him for breaking a glass or for being unable to bring him a cup of coffee without spilling. He learned to cure himself of that in Sudan. So as soon as he got this job he began practicing at night with a tray full of stones that were as light as the cups of tea. If the stones moved he knew he had failed and would try again until eventually he probably could have walked several miles without once spilling a drop of tea or shifting a single stone.

“He hid his earnings in a pocket sewn into the inside of his pants. When he had enough loose change to turn into a bill, he would exchange each time at a different store. The one friend he had in the town, a man by the name of Abrahim, had told him to never let anyone know how much money he had.

“‘If someone sees you have two dollars, he will think you have twenty. If someone sees you with twenty, he will think you have two hundred. It’s always better to make people think you have nothing at all.’

“Abrahim was the one who found him the job carrying tea. He met my father on his third day in town and he knew immediately that he was a foreigner. He went up to him and said, in perfect English, ‘Hello. My name is Abrahim, like the prophet. Let me help you while you’re in this town.’

“He was several inches shorter and better dressed than most of the other men that my father had seen there. His head was bald with the exception of two graying tufts of hair that arced between his ears. The last two fingers on his right hand looked as if they had been crushed and then tied together. He bowed his head slightly when he introduced himself and walked with what might have been a small limp, which in my father’s mind made trusting him easier.

“At first my father slept outside, near the harbor, where hundreds of other men also camped out, most of them refugees like him. They huddled together in small groups, and as he passed them, he often thought he heard them laughing at him. He was the only one out there who slept alone. Abrahim had told him that it was dangerous to do so, but he had also told him that if he slept in the town he was certain to be beaten and arrested by the police.