Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

She had a point, but I had a point too: Didn’t she want to know what the world was?

“That isn’t knowledge ,” she said. “How can you say that?”

There happened to be any number of women I could show off for if Adinah thought I was full of shit. I flirted with these women, in the newspaper office and on the street, but I didn’t, as they say, do anything. I had sold my freedom for love and I was keeping the bargain. I lived with two creatures I loved, didn’t I?

Adinah started talking to her parents again. “At least I don’t have to put on a midi skirt and long sleeves and a snood over my hair to talk to them,” she said. Sometimes she put Becky on the phone. And me. Hello, Gerard, how are you? Hello, we are fine, they said. And a happy holiday to you. What stiffness in their voices, what years of woe. They were brighter with Becky, whom I could hear gurgling at them. In their photos they looked entirely ordinary and benign — her mother’s wig was the same style as Rosalynn Carter’s hairdo and her father was smiling under his black plastic eyeglasses, with a yarmulke hardly bigger than a cookie on his balding head. How used to themselves they were, how forever stunned to lose Adinah. In our Sufi group, they had a song with a lot of percussion that was supposed to mean, The paths of love are long and complicated . It wasn’t human love the song was about either, which made me think all of it was too fucking difficult.

I came home one day with another story from work. A sanitation cop went to give a storekeeper a ticket for illegal garbage on the street, and the big bag of garbage turned out to be the guy’s wife, wrapped in plastic, sleeping off a drunk in the rain. A wife he hadn’t seen in five years! I got a shot of her standing up and waving like the queen. Adinah said, “That’s pretty sad. You don’t think that’s funny, do you?”

“ I don’t,” I said.

“The other guys did.”

“Oh, yeah. They’re still laughing.”

“I knew it.”

“I like my work,” I said. “Do you mind?”

I knew she’d hate that story, so why did I parade it? She sighed. She’d taken to not bothering to argue with me, which wasn’t a good sign.

I was plenty attracted to certain other women — there was a reporter on the paper who reminded me of Sandie, a fast-talking redhead with a very great body. When we were hanging out at the coffee machine, giving each other the eye, I’d think, It’s not worth it, I don’t want to make a mess of everything, I have Adinah .

In the end it was Adinah who left me. Not for a man, but for a name. In her Sufi group she took on a spiritual guide (you were supposed to do this), a woman in her forties whom Adinah called Tasnim, which meant “Spring of Paradise.” Her real name was Carolyn (all the initiates had names their guides gave them) and she was a plumpish woman with a soft voice and blinking eyes. I’d met her at the group long ago, and it surprised me that Adinah picked someone so uncharismatic. Adinah said I’d always gone to Sufism as another drug, a way to cultivate certain states. So was that wrong? “You didn’t want to go very far,” Adinah said.

She was right that I didn’t buy the God part. “Well, that’s the whole thing,” Adinah said. “And it’s not like a single Person. It’s the whole Big Enchilada that everything else is inside of. You know?”

I was still interested in this, but I’d stopped needing it. I didn’t have the same hunger to get out of myself, now that my days ran on act-first-think-later and blood-and-guts and what felt like success. I was a fair-weather friend to religion. Adinah thought I was shallow.

I was not happy to know this, but we’d always had ups and downs. All the work of taking care of Becky could make our bed a place more for sleep than for love, but sometimes Adinah had gorgeous revivals of feeling. If I was patient, if I could wait while she got our girl to sleep, if she wasn’t too tired, a deeper hunger swelled in her. The frank physicality of motherhood seemed to take her to new frontiers. Lucky me , I’d thought. Okay, then some long lulls took hold of us. Nothing newsworthy in that. And for some time I was doing the male version of going through the motions. My body rose to excitement, but the rest of me didn’t much care. I kept on because I wanted the form of it, I wanted us to be following the ways of a family. As far as I knew, Adinah (who must’ve noticed) moved with me in that spirit. I thought we agreed.

The Sufi name her guide gave her was Satya, which meant “Sincere” or “Truthful.” “Yes!” I said. “You are. That’s a great name.”

Someone with this name, Adinah thought, wasn’t someone who could live in our house. What?

“We live in a house of fake feeling,” Adinah said. “You have to pretend every day to hold anything I say in any regard at all.”

“ You don’t listen to me !” I said, not intelligently.

“If I do, it’s to humor you.”

“Very nice.”

“You don’t even bother to humor me,” she said

“You want me to say, Yes, I do ?”

There was a bad pause. “This isn’t the way to live,” she said. “By lying. I have to tell you, I’m going.”

“Go,” I said.

I didn’t mean it, not really. I said it out of hardness— Go if you’re going —but I wanted us to stay together. I seemed to want many things. I wanted Becky, who was still in her twos, to cuddle up with me; I wanted Adinah to be with me on life’s highway; I wanted to patrol the world of cruelty with my mighty lens; I wanted the old side of my sexual nature to be free again.

What did Adinah want? Not me. She was stuck on the notion of me as bogus and false and fake, as well as loutish and unsuitable. I was in the way of what she hoped to be. How had we ever started? She said I wasn’t much of a father anyway, and maybe she was right. We said things we never should have said, and in the end I was the one who left the premises. Out of the Door and down in the street all alone. I had Becky on weekends. She cried when I came to take her with me and she cried when I dropped her off. Why were we doing this? Who was happier?

And Adinah wasn’t above making extra demands about money, inventing things they couldn’t do without. “Don’t act so surprised at what stuff costs,” she said.

“I thought you were such a good Sufi,” I said.

“We think the world is real ,” she said. “You never got any of this right. It’s all God, but veiled. I don’t know why I’m even talking to you about it.”

“Because I’m Mr. Moneybags,” I said. Becky was throwing her wooden blocks at my knees while we spoke. “Cut it out,” I said. “Right now.” How could we go on this way?

We got used to it. Becky had her own room in the apartment I had in the Haight, a room with a pink record player and a dollhouse. She called me Daddy Dad Dad in case I forgot who I was. Adinah had a Sufi college student, a nice girl with an early version of punk hair, move in to help with the rent, although I was covering most of it, and she got work as a dog walker, which didn’t pay that badly.

I took up with the redhead at work — why not? — and I at least had my head always flooded with erotic afterimages. It startled me to be charged with so much sensation at the will of someone so other — I hardly knew her, compared to Adinah — and I was newly amazed by the mystery of these reactions. She had another boyfriend somewhere herself, so we had a good understanding.

Once I was late to pick up Becky because of her, and another time I actually forgot it was my night and I didn’t show up. How could I forget? I was too unfeeling and selfish to be anyone’s father. I lived in this truth for a month and stayed away — I yelled back at Adinah when she phoned, I wouldn’t take her calls at work, I experimented with being a total prick. Why pretend different? And then (when I woke up in sudden anguish) I begged to see Becky again, and Adinah let me. I guess she had to. I was so glad to see her, my Becky with her fat cheeks. But things were always a little fucked up after that.