Dinaw Mengestu - The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

When I finally rang the doorbell, Naomi answered. Her mother had tried to braid her hair into a row of plaits, but it had come out as a half-dozen uneven, lopsided braids that erupted into a tuft in the back. It gave Naomi an oddly menacing look that somehow seemed intended. She stood in the doorway looking like a lunatic and stared at me as if I were the man responsible for all of the world’s frustrated desires, a fool who accidentally gave bad directions to people on their honeymoons, contemptuous but good-natured.

“You’re late,” she said.

I looked down at my watch. I was still five minutes early.

“I’m sorry, madame,” I said, bowing my head just slightly. “But my chauffeur had a terrible time finding the house. I would fire him, but he is after all just a monkey, and you know how they can be.”

“Henry?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

She shook her head, as if to say I understand, more than you can ever imagine, just how difficult a monkey chauffeur can be. This was not, of course, the only time I had pinned something on a monkey.

“My mom said you should wait in the living room,” Naomi said.

She turned and darted up the stairs two at a time. As she did, the braids in the back of her hair bounced off her billowy Afro.

This was the first time I had ever been in Judith’s living room, although I had seen fractions of it dozens of times before. At night, the heavy red curtains that draped over the front windows were pulled back far enough to allow more than a peek into the living room. It was the same thing with all of the other newly refurbished houses in the neighborhood; curtains provocatively peeled back to reveal a warmly lit room with forest green couches, modern silver lamps that craned their necks like swans, and sleek glass coffee tables with fresh flowers bursting on top. There was something about affluence that needed exposure, that resisted closed windows and poor lighting and made a willing spectacle of everything. The houses invited, practically begged and demanded, to be watched. When I took my walks at night, this was what I did. I stared into the living rooms of others. I stood across the street on the tips of my toes and tried to catch a glimpse of the kitchen, or the dining room, or the paintings on the wall. Kandinsky and Rothko prints over the sealed-up marble fireplaces; long, elegant dining tables made to look as if they had been hand-carved out of a single block of wood; walls that were painted a subtle shade of gold that was perhaps picked up by the massive vase of plastic sunflowers in the corner. Rarely did I ever see the people who lived in those houses, as if each were merely display-case props of revitalization. Sometimes I thought of what I was doing as window shopping.

An old record player and radio the size of a desk, made of wood and with a dozen chrome knobs, sat in the hallway. The living room had a heavy black wall-mounted phone from the early twentieth century, and a silver clock stuck permanently on two-twenty. The leather couches, chestnut colored and densely packed, were separated by a wooden coffee table that had at least fifty small drawers along its side. It was all so solid, comfortable, and familiar, as if Judith had deliberately picked only pieces of furniture that had proven their ability to withstand time.

From somewhere in the house, Judith called out, “I’ll be right down. I just have to finish something up.” Behind her voice I could hear Naomi’s barely restrained cries to be left alone. In one of those rooms upstairs, Judith was pulling away at her daughter’s hair, while her daughter was pulling away from her mother’s confused, desperate hands. It was a subtle negotiation of unspoken differences.

When the two of them came down the stairs fifteen minutes later, each looked spent and frustrated. Naomi’s hair was now all in braids, more or less evenly separated. She led the way, with her mother just a step behind. Judith was wearing her glasses, which gave her small, narrow face an added sense of depth that seemed to be previously missing.

“I’m sorry we kept you waiting so long. Naomi and I had some unfinished business to settle.”

We kissed each other on both cheeks. Judith’s hand lingered for what I thought was a second beyond polite on my back.

“You’re the first dinner guest we’ve had in our new house.”

“Well, I feel honored.”

“You should. Naomi hates having other people in the house.”

“Is that true, Naomi?”

Naomi was standing pressed against the wall with her hands tucked behind her.

“Yup,” she said.

She popped her lips hard on the “p” for emphasis as she rocked back on her heels.

“You’ve got good taste for someone your age,” I told her.

Judith led me to the dining room, which was still overrun with boxes of books that she said she didn’t know what to do with. Most of them, she said, were terribly boring academic books that she didn’t want to think about or look at anymore. In another life, she had been a professor of American political history.

“And for a while, it was great,” she said. “I loved it. The students, the summers off. I could pick Naomi up from school every day. And at night I still had the energy to go out for dinner or watch a movie.”

“What happened?” I asked her.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “That life seems so far away now. Naomi’s father left. That didn’t help. We moved from Chicago to Boston to Virginia, and now here. Nothing felt good enough anymore.”

She had the habit of tucking and untucking her hair from behind her right ear as she spoke. She hesitated for a few seconds before speaking again.

“Suddenly I saw myself twenty years in the future saying the same thing over and over to students who stayed the same age, and I couldn’t believe that this was what I had planned on. It’s hard sometimes to remember why we do anything in the first place. It’s nice to think there’s a purpose, or even a real decision that turns everything in one direction, but that’s not always true, is it? We just fall into our lives. How did you get to own a grocery store?”

“Some people are just lucky,” I said.

“Is that what that was?”

“It also helps if you don’t care where you land.”

Instead of sitting at the dining-room table, Judith suggested we eat on the couch.

“We can be less formal that way, don’t you think?” she said.

I nodded my head in agreement. We ate our dinner off porcelain plates with gold-trimmed edges while sitting on the leather couches. Judith and Naomi were spread out on one while I sat across from them with my food delicately balanced on my lap. I watched every bite as it traveled from the tip of my fork into my mouth. I tried to erase any sound of food being ground into bits by chewing slowly, but it was never quite enough. I was still there, with all of my flaws, in Judith’s immaculate living room, which was larger and grander than anything I had ever sat and eaten in since coming to Logan Circle. I kept my legs close together and limited my movements to a few simple nods of the head. My plate teetered on a few occasions, and had it fallen on the newly restored hardwood floors, I’m confident I would have shattered with it.

We ate in silence for several minutes, the only sounds being those of our forks scraping gently against the plates. Finally Judith made a desperate attempt to overcome the sudden silence.

“Did you ever get to read Ralph Emerson or Alexis de Tocqueville?” she asked.

“A little,” I said.

“Years ago,” I added a moment later to cover up the lie.

“Americans hate history,” she said. She began to lecture then about Emerson and Tocqueville, about America’s repudiation of history and its antipathy toward anything that resembled the past. Her eyes trailed off to a corner of the living room, where they stayed locked. She spoke eloquently and passionlessly, her words probably repeated a hundred times over the years in front of crowded classrooms. She wasn’t speaking to me or Naomi but to the room, which needed to be filled with at least one of our voices. I nodded my head and listened attentively, trying to find a narrow gap in which I could insert a well-timed grunt of agreement.