Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

The club had a big resurgence in the nineties — all of a sudden half of Paris wanted to hear some Algerian raï group that had been playing there for years — and lines clogged the street outside. Ahmed, in a display of enterprise she’d hardly seen before, opened another club a few blocks away, which was also packed. Maybe a third club? What a busy, lit-up ringmaster he turned into — in those years he was an overwrought and entirely happy man. They were both in their fifties by then, and Liliane managed to at least get a better wardrobe out of all his hunches paying off. A black cashmere coat with raglan sleeves, a short red dress by a great designer that looked wonderful on her. She still had them.

He was only sixty when he died, cracking his handsome, beloved head when he fell off a ladder he’d mounted to check out a faulty spotlight. Liliane wailed like an animal when they told her. She could not swallow the impossible stupidity of the accident — he was not a man who should’ve died at that age. Quick and strong, free of the bad habits of most club owners, tuned to the pleasures of this earth.

His friends — perfectly nice men she’d known for years — said that she really should not go to the funeral, women didn’t go to the ceremony. She stayed back in his sister’s house (his mother was long gone), helping the women in the family prepare for the visitors who came after. She was too stricken to be indignant, though later at home she heard herself mutter a few completely idiotic anti-Muslim things to Emile, who said, “Oh, stop. You can, I know.” Ahmed had liked his mosque (when he bothered to go), it had great Sufi chanting and singing, but Liliane was raging at everything in those days.

And what was she going to do? The clubs could not go on without Ahmed. She would get by, she always did, but how? Musicians were planning a memorial concert to honor him, and there was talk of raising some money for her as part of this. Before it could happen, a lawyer called her about the will. Ahmed had apparently been putting his profits (what profits?) into real estate. He had left nice sums to his sisters, but there were two buildings in Belleville and a good-sized lot near Orly that were now hers and worth more euros than she could guess. It was the great shock of her life — she was more stunned than if he had been unfaithful for years. He had tricked her, outsmarted her behind her back. Probably he hadn’t wanted her to know about the money for fear she would spend it. Well, she would’ve wanted to. Had he thought he couldn’t resist her?

It was not a comfortable mystery, and it was strange being joyous about the money just when she was beaten flat by the weight of constant despair. If death ate everything, could it possibly matter that money had come to her? To Liliane it could. At first she did nothing but cash the checks from the rents when an agent sent them. How illicit it felt, how underhanded the glee of the money seemed. As if she were a spy, impersonating Ahmed’s wife, when he didn’t have a wife. A well-paid spy.

“I feel like an impostor,” she said to Emile.

“Some people like that feeling,” Emile said. He was not such a person — this was why he lived in the country and sold cheeses for a living — but he was not an innocent.

Liliane knew very little about managing property, but she learned what she could and she believed she had more sense than most people. In time she turned into the harder sort of boss (this did not surprise her), with an eye out for corruption, wily enough in hiring contractors, raising rents, firing the lazy, and sneaking around certain taxes. Later she sold the Orly piece at what turned out to be a very opportune time.

None of this was what newspapers would call big money, but it was to Liliane, who came from a family of bricklayers. In France no one ever mistook her for well connected, and she was amused when she and Emile took a trip to Antibes, and some Americans at the hotel assumed her style was aristocratic. Emile thought it was because they heard him telling her how he missed the sheikh. Liliane ended up befriending one of the Americans anyway, a tiny, hearty woman who told funny stories at breakfast, and they all went together to hear jazz outside at night. Deedee, the woman, had decent taste in music.

And Liliane was very glad she had Deedee to spend some days with, in this month of vacation she was giving herself in New York. They got along very well, despite Deedee’s immensely comical notion that Liliane was a woman who went to balls and benefits. “No one has money anymore,” Deedee could say, and she meant people had two hundred million instead of three hundred. Something like that.

Liliane herself had lost quite a bit in the “ crise ”—it wasn’t such a good time to be in real estate after all. Her attempts to recoup had been especially disastrous. She’d come here (she’d always liked Americans) as a very necessary break from the vice of buying and selling and putting her money in the wrong places. The last months had shaken her confidence. She was thinking about more travel now, on the theory she might as well spend it before it disappeared on its own. Emile wouldn’t care what he was left. Or did everyone always care?

This party for Deedee’s charity was in a very beautiful garden, an enclave of formal greenery near 105th Street, quite unlike the rest of New York. Worth seeing, certainly. It had allées of fruit trees and grassy terraces and a fountain of dancing bronze maidens. The boy was saying, “People get married here, although I wouldn’t say it was a really sexy garden.”

“Who is saying that a wedding must have to be sexy?” Liliane said.

“I’ve never been married myself. I bow to your greater knowledge,” he said.

Liliane gave him a look. The boy had a good head, squarish and somehow graceful, with brownish hair gelled back from his forehead.

“I was married in a mosque,” she said.

Generally, people switched the subject when you mentioned mosques. He asked if he could get her more punch, another tidbit?

Deedee came by when she was alone. “We did well, I’m very happy,” she said. “Look how many people. For a great cause.”

A woman behind them wore a lovely, broad-brimmed straw hat, trimmed with whimsical flowers. She certainly didn’t look as if she were thinking about lepers, but why should she be? Weren’t her dollars worth more than thoughts? Liliane was of that opinion, although she hadn’t always been.

The boy was back with an Indian sweetmeat, a delicious lump of what he said was chickpea flour and sugar and clarified butter. “I totally stuffed myself on these when I was living in India,” he said.

“Did you like it there?” she asked.

“No and yes. It’s mind-boggling. You have to keep five hundred contradictions in your head at once to even pay attention there.”

Liliane was starting to like him better.

“Don’t even ask how many calories these have,” Deedee said. “But you don’t have to worry.”

“She certainly doesn’t,” Rudy said. “It’s a French secret, isn’t it? I think they are a superior race.”

Rudy lingered with his assistant, Veena, after the guests were gone and the caterers were folding up the chairs. “Success!” she said. “Good turnout.”

“These things cost too much money,” he said. “Low profit. We’re not a big outfit.”

“Oh, we’re always in a squeeze. What else is new?”

“Yes,” Rudy said. “Mighty me. I’ll carry us all.”

His oldest friends would’ve laughed themselves silly at his carrying anyone anywhere. They thought he was a doofus in a suit, a slacker who’d managed to disguise himself as employed. Little did they know he was a professional. Who wants to be conned by a sharpie? No, the modest young fellow is the one you want to write a check to. That was what disarming meant: didn’t know what hit you.