Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

But it wasn’t the most intriguing film in the collection. That mantle belonged to a mid-seventies film starring Isabelle Adjani. It was called L’Histoire de Adèle H . The container it came in contained a note from Marie-Anne’s father addressed to her mother: This is the actress that Martin Ryerson said you looked like. Take a look. I think the resemblance is uncanny. The note had been written with a ballpoint pen, one that was short on ink so that some of the letters were without color. Marie-Anne had never mentioned her mother resembling any actress, so I figured she was either unaware of the film’s existence or would never bring it up with me. I decided to go ahead and watch it.

In the film Adjani plays the second daughter of the novelist Victor Hugo. She spends her life chasing an indifferent British man around the world, subsumed in her love for him, destroyed in the end by the inability to attain him. The story wasn’t what was compelling. Most of the magic of the film lay in Adjani. She really did look like Rasha Florence Quinn. Not identical twins by any means, but similar enough to be long-lost sisters.

My initial impulse was to hide the film, because if Marie-Anne were to see it she would probably suffer another bout of sadness.

The trouble was that I had underestimated my own reaction to Adjani. She struck me as immaculate. I found myself obsessed with Adjani’s mouth. The way it curved downward at the edges, with that perfect lower lip like the hull of a prophetic ark or the arc of a perfect plot. Her eyes were compulsive. Peals of pain running across her pupils. A thorn jammed inside an iris. A knot in the cornea that couldn’t be cut. Her body was like a tree, progressively twisted and gnarled by the gravity of her love. Adjani started stalking me, stealing upon me when I was sleeping, an uncontrollable apparition. Beauty. Every time she prodded my conscience I wanted to draw out the film and watch it again. That’s precisely what I ended up doing. I tucked the film underneath the cushions of the sofa and proceeded to watch it whenever I was eating. The only time I withheld watching was if Marie-Anne was at home. There was no need to subject her to her mother’s doppelgänger.

Seeing Adjani on repeat aroused in me all the dormant thoughts of Mrs. Quinn. I thought about the first time I had seen her. It hadn’t been at the steakhouse in Buckhead, but a few months earlier, at our graduation at Emory. Marie-Anne and I had agreed that graduation wasn’t the right time to tell our parents about each other. I had been with my parents and Marie-Anne had been with hers, just a few yards away, sharing a close embrace with her mother, who was wearing a printed sundress with a parasol hat in purple and had a champagne flute in her left hand. While Marie-Anne had been holding her mother close she had peered over a shoulder, given me a wink, and pointed to her mother’s back and mouthed the words My mom! in my direction. Then she had planted a big soft kiss on her mother’s shoulder and given me a thumbs-up. There had been something vulnerable in Marie-Anne’s need to make sure that she was linked to her mother at a moment like that. I had gone away from graduation equating Mrs. Quinn with the ability to unlock the deeper levels of my then-girlfriend’s vulnerability, and with a separate wish; namely, to one day be close enough to Marie-Anne that she would want her mother to experience affection from me as well. Obviously that moment had never materialized. The next time I saw Mrs. Quinn had been at the announcement of our engagement. From then on she’d been nothing but a conniver and enemy against me. Against us.

The revival of the memory was upsetting. What kind of woman was Rasha Florence Quinn that she couldn’t see how much Marie-Anne felt for her? How could she undermine her daughter’s matrimonial decision? The only rational explanation was that Mrs. Quinn knew exactly how much clout she had with her daughter, that she was fully aware how weak Marie-Anne was in front of her, and she simply felt no remorse in taking advantage of it. Until now I had never let myself dislike Mrs. Quinn, believing that if I let rancor toward her settle into my spirit, then Marie-Anne would somehow manage to see it and be hurt by my judgment. But something about conceiving of Mrs. Quinn as Adjani, observing her from a third-person perspective, made it easier to let my resentment turn belligerent. I could conceive of her in all sorts of unflattering ways and not feel like I was insulting Marie-Anne. I could let myself imagine violating her, slapping her, for the punishment she had inflicted on my wife. You are a petty, petty woman, I wanted to get on top of her and scream. You have no idea how much suffering you’ve inflicted.

The next time I watched L’Histoire d’ Ad è le H ., I paused it during an inappropriate scene. Then, aghast by what I had done, I hid the film underneath the sofa cushion.

* * *

One morning Richard Konigsberg surprised me at the apartment. He arrived at the building and buzzed on the aged speakerphone. It squawked like a duck with rusted vocal cords. Richard pressed the button over and over again. I knew what he was doing. He was making sure I was irritated. He said he enjoyed making people turn acid like vinegar, because vinegar was how you cleaned the urine and fecal matter of the world.

I met him in the lobby. He was not his usual self, looking listless and distant. His face was there but the eyes seemed reeled back into the head. His physique had lost much of its authority. The lines of his body and the void that surrounded him now all ran into one another, as if he had been left unfinished by some attention-deficient painter.

“Did a gold digger clean you out?”

“No, the Big Nonexistent did.” He jerked his thumb upward.

His declaration came at around the same time a pair of toddlers across the lobby ran to the grand piano. They bashed their heads upon the lower octave.

I took Richard by the elbow and led him to the café attached to the building. I sat on the inside so he was facing the window. He made me switch seats.

“Twenty years old,” he sighed into his latte. “In the military. Got blown up in Afghanistan.”

“Who?”

“My son,” he croaked.

“Your son? I didn’t know you had a son.”

I stared at him with a lump in my throat, the force of his announcement pounding through my body. We had never been men who dealt with the unexpected. Everything we did in life was the consequence of careful planning. Yet here we were, over the period of a few months, coming to each other slammed by the unpredictable.

Richard tried to keep his lips together, but they insisted on ripping their sutures. He choked a little. “I didn’t either. I slept with this stripper in Chicago. She knew the whole time I was the father. But she didn’t want to be connected to a Jew. Can you believe that? The kid was broke, so instead of college he became the few, the proud, the dead. Here I was. With all this money. He could have had it all.”

Richard’s face collapsed upon the bones. He was a bighearted man, gregarious and caring, who had been destined to go out as a shooting star, or in some orgiastic storm. But that was not what would happen now. He would shrivel up and become silent and find that when he tried to flick his eyes toward a fine female, his eyelids and his pupils simply wouldn’t react. Here and there around Philly there were losers from Atlantic City who went and drowned everything in one fell weekend, and came back and sat in Love Park, or on the stone benches at Eakins Oval, and just rocked back and forth, without an identity, without money, the only papyrus in their possession the four-chambered one in their chest. That was what would happen to my friend.