Imbolo Mbue - Behold the Dreamers

He carried the blue notebook with him at all working hours, and presented it to Cindy every morning so she could read it on her way to work. Sometimes she appeared to read every detail, nodding and referencing previous pages. Always, she gave it back to him with no comment besides a quick thanks and a reminder to keep writing.

“I will continue writing, madam,” he always said as he held the door open for her to step out of the car. “Have a great day, madam.”

And her days did seem to be getting great, right from around when he began submitting the entries to her.

Phone calls with her friends were no longer peppered with teary whispers about “what he’s doing to me” and doubts about “how much longer I can go on like this.” She was laughing a little more, and by the time Jende gave her three weeks’ worth of entries, she was laughing a lot more, and louder. Her looks did not return to where they’d been the year before (her skin, though still supple-looking, had lost some of its glow, and her collarbones were sticking out even higher), and she did not stop talking about Vince, worrying that he hadn’t responded to her email in three days, but she found reasons to smile, like the fact that June and Mike had reconciled, and she and Mighty and Clark were going to St. Barths for Christmas. It should be a wonderful time, she told her friends, and Jende fervently wished so, too, because after months of hearing her groan and sigh, and watching her rest her head against the window with her hand on her cheek and her eyes on the blissful world outside, shake her head, and dejectedly say, whatever, Clark, do whatever you want; after seeing too much of the persistent pain she concealed so splendidly when she wasn’t around her family and closest friends, he very badly wanted the madam to have a wonderful time.

Which was what she seemed to have had when she and Clark attended a gala at the Waldorf Astoria the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Clark’s parents had come for the holiday, along with his sister and nieces, and days later, Mighty had told Jende what an awesome Thanksgiving his family had had. They had celebrated it with June’s family, as they always did (the two families alternated hosting duties every year), and his mother and grandmother and aunt had cooked and baked all day, laughing and telling stories in the kitchen. It was the first Thanksgiving his dad’s family had spent together in forever, because with his grandparents in California and his aunt and cousins in Seattle, it had been hard to get everyone together, considering work schedules and his dad and aunt’s shared hatred of holiday travel. But this year everyone said they had to do it, and it had been so much fun. Jende was surprised to learn that Cindy and her mother-in-law loved each other, because in Limbe mothers-in-law were often the reason wives stayed up at night crying, but Mighty had told him that no, his mom called his grandparents “Mom and Dad” and always made sure to phone them at least once a month as well as on their birthdays and wedding anniversary. She always insisted Mighty and Vince do the same, and whenever they forgot, she scolded them and reminded them that family was everything.

Indeed, Jende could see in Cindy’s new joy, days after Thanksgiving, that the security of family was her greatest source of happiness. Thanks to this rediscovered bliss, hers was no longer a marriage limping from day to day but one skipping and kicking up its heels and waltzing from evening to evening to Johann Strauss’s “Voices of Spring.”

On the day of the Waldorf Astoria gala, she and Clark entered the car beaming, the happiest Jende had ever seen them, apart or together, in over a year of working for them. Maybe the notebook entries had blown her fears away, Jende thought, assured her that her husband was a good man. Or perhaps the family reunion had reminded her of everything worth fighting for. Or perhaps it was due to something else that had happened between her and her husband, something Jende had no way of knowing. Whatever it was, it was more than sufficient to turn them into young lovers, whispering and giggling on the ride to the gala: she, lustrous in a red strapless trumpet gown; he, youthful and suave in a perfect-fitting tuxedo. They reentered the car five hours later in even greater merriment, laughing about things that had transpired on the dance floor.

“I never thought the day would come when I would see Mr. and Mrs. Edwards happy like that,” Jende said to Neni when he got home after midnight.

“Were they kissing and doing all kinds of things in the backseat?” Neni asked as she placed his dinner on the table.

“No, God forbid. I would have had an accident in one minute if I’d seen that. They were only leaning against each other and speaking into each other’s ears and she was laughing very loud at everything he was saying. He was playing with her hair … Anyway, I didn’t want to look too much, but the whole thing was really shocking me.”

“I wonder what happened. You think maybe she put a few drops of love potion in his food? The really strong one that makes a man fall for you and treat you like a queen?”

“Ah, Neni!” Jende said, laughing. “American women do not use love potions.”

“That’s what you think?” Neni said, laughing, too. “They use it, oh. They call it lingerie.”

IT WOULD BE NOTHING BUT A BLIP IN A LONG PERIOD OF ENNUI, A BRIEF reprieve from the agony of putrid unions. Two days after the gala at the Waldorf Astoria, a story would appear in a daily tabloid, and the butterfly their marriage was turning into would morph back into a caterpillar.

It was a story that, in ordinary times, would have been dismissed as rubbish. Because, really, no one with a true sense of the world could be naïve enough to think such things didn’t happen. If there had been no collective desire to find the presumed architects of the financial crisis despicable, few would have cared to read the story. Its regurgitation in newspapers of record and blogs of repute would have been another reminder why the American society as a whole could never call itself highbrow, why the easy availability of stories on the private lives of others was turning adults, who would otherwise be enriching their minds with worthwhile knowledge, into juveniles who needed the satisfaction of knowing that others were more pathetic than them.

But the story, though it first appeared in an ignoble tabloid, was not dismissed. Rather, it was talked about in barbershops and on playground benches, forwarded to neighbors and classmates. It was a time of anguish in New York City, and those who put the story on the front page knew where they wanted the rage of the downtrodden to flow.

“Did you see it?” Leah said to Jende after he had seen her missed call and called her back during his lunch break.

“See what?” Jende asked.

“The story from the prostitute. It’s juicy!”

“Juicy?”

“Poor Clark! I really hope he’s not—”

“I don’t know what you are talking about, Leah.”

“Oh, honey, you obviously haven’t read it,” Leah said excitedly. “Well, you won’t believe it, but this woman, this escort — I hate when they use such fancy words for prostitutes — anyway, she claims she has a lot of clients from Barclays, and, listen to this, her clients are paying for her service with bailout money!”

“Bailout money?”

“Bailout money! Can you believe it?”

Jende shook his head but didn’t reply. The bailout thing was in the news every day, but he still didn’t understand if it was a good thing or a bad thing.

“And you want to hear the crazy part?” Leah went on, her voice getting pitchier in excitement. “One of the executives she mentions as her frequent clients is Clark!”