Joan Silber - Fools - Stories

And she didn’t have that much money. The insult was for nothing. Was this how the Indian lepers were fed? When she got back to the hotel that night, she went to bed and dreamed that she was entirely naked and sitting on the gritty curb of a city street. She was trying to cover herself — she looked in the gutter for old plastic bags and wrappers, dirty pages of newspaper, and she held these scraps of garbage against her lap. And there were naked children, a whole row of them, settled in the street alongside her, foraging refuse the same way. The children called her “madame,” they were saying something to her, but then she woke up.

She was under clean white sheets in her hotel in New York and the room was cold. Americans liked air-conditioning too much. There was no reason for her to be here. What did she want from this place? Recreation, diversion, escape. This rough, crude city, full of grasping morons: What had she been thinking?

The next day, which was Sunday, Rudy felt the effects of last night’s alcohol, but he did remember that he had to call Deedee before he did anything else. She was a person who actually went to church, so he lingered over breakfast until noon, and then she answered her home phone. “I wanted to ask you about Liliane,” he said. “Donors always want things. You know, kinds of satisfaction. What would she want?”

“You know what I worry about,” Deedee said. “If she’s a Muslim — which of course is perfectly fine — we fund all these centers for Hindus. You can see in the photos they have statues of gods with garlands of marigolds on them in the courtyards. She might not like that. Lot of violence between the groups in India.”

Oh, please. Deedee was usually a little sharper than that.

“Do you think she might want to dedicate something as a gift for her husband?” he said.

“What a lovely idea,” Deedee said. “I never thought of that. That’s how you do what you do, isn’t it? You can think of how people can do the right thing and please themselves too.”

“Yes, well, there’s always a challenge in getting some romance into leprosy.”

“I know there are romantic stories,” Deedee said. “You wrote them.”

It was true that in the last newsletter Rudy had written a feature about Bamala and Pandi, two infected people in a center near Thanjavur. They had been engaged to each other as children in a village, but then the engagement was broken when Bamala became sick. Years later they met by chance at a Hansen’s Hope center when Pandi was very ill. He was now doing well on drugs, Bamala had grown older and stronger, and they were planning to marry.

And how was Rudy going to work that into a conversation? And there were parts left out — damage, abandonment, trauma, ostracism. But he liked the story, and who didn’t like it when love triumphed? Rudy was not himself a fool for love. He had resisted Berry, in India, surely the woman he’d loved best, when she wanted him to settle with her for good. Why had he not leaped at that chance? Well, he hadn’t.

He thought Liliane, who was not likely to get any other husbands at this stage, might go for the idea of a handsome memorial gesture, a Taj Mahal. It was, frankly, the only thing he could think of.

Rudy had dealt with any number of widows. You had to tread very carefully, not to kick against any anguished regrets or buried anger. You had to keep remembrances abstract. No frankness. Once, at a funeral, he’d heard the dead person’s best friend say, “She was such a fucking prima donna.” This was said right in the eulogy, and the dead person had once been Rudy’s girlfriend, not too long before. It was Clara, the girl who’d told him what a high-stress job he had.

How hard he had been on Clara, with her pop-psych sympathy for one well-fed white man’s office job. He’d told her she had no clue, and she’d said, “No one can talk to you, you’re such a snob, you think you’ve visited hell like Jesus.” But she had been weeping as she said it, he was more or less out the door. And a few months later she had died, from the mistake of walking into an unmarked elevator shaft, before she could learn anything.

He was sorry that he hadn’t seen fit to be nicer to her; the dead can get you that way. He let women go too easily (a number of women had mentioned this), and he did act as if he were the only person in the so-called first world untainted by privilege. Liliane could probably tell this about him already.

So this was the plan. Rudy would take Liliane on a fascinating excursion, nothing too exhausting, and then Deedee would join them for a pleasant, cozy cocktail in the late afternoon. He called Liliane at her hotel and told her they were going to skip the obvious spots and get into real neighborhoods instead.

“I’m not sure,” Liliane said. “Can I call you later?”

He was depressed when he hung up. What else did she have to do? He’d had in mind Jackson Heights, in Queens, which had as many South Asians as Mumbai, or was that an urban myth? Rolled leaves of beeda and beaded saris in the store windows. The Patel Brothers Supermarket, bins of okra and bitter gourds and pomelos, sacks of rice in three dozen varieties, rosewood rolling pins, round brass thali trays. Would she like that? An India of plenty — maybe that was the wrong message. No, she would like it.

Or maybe a Moroccan neighborhood? Her husband was Moroccan. There was a teeny area in Astoria, there was a restaurant people liked.

Or maybe she would like to see where he grew up. Rudy had lived his first eighteen years in an East Village apartment his parents had cleverly subdivided, with a room for him with his own “treehouse,” aka a loft bed. His parents both worked for a left-leaning radio station — they were a stormy couple and were enchanted but neglectful parents. In his teen years his mother had begun to die, slowly and fitfully, from leukemia, and he and his father had cooked for her and played her favorite music all day and night, Otis Redding and John Lennon and Country Joe and the Fish. Now Rudy’s father lived upstate, with a new wife, but the old neighborhood on Second Avenue was not all that changed.

He would give Liliane a day or two, he didn’t pressure people. What if she said no? Either she would or she wouldn’t. What were the chances of her ever giving a penny to Hansen’s Hope? He’d say thirty percent. Sometimes he still thought like an investment banker. It would help his case to know more about the husband. She used her own last name, so the man couldn’t be Googled. And how many Moroccan sheikhs were there? A search brought up religious leaders, which could not be right.

It was ridiculous that the roof of a building that housed sick children in Tamil Nadu was still leaking because he hadn’t coaxed the funds out of a bored and overdressed old woman. He hated the way the world was set up, and he was sorry nobody wanted to overthrow these people anymore. He was sorry he couldn’t just squash her flat and drain all the money out of her, he really was.

Rudy was not in the best mood when he went out that night. He spent too many hours in a bar on Rivington Street, where he kept having one more beer to get over being pissed off (famous fallacies of the already-drunk) and he got into a conversation with some lunkhead who was holding forth about the Ground Zero Mosque, did it have to be in that spot, and who really, really was paying for it?

“It’s called Park51,” Rudy said. “That’s its name.”

“That’s what the Muslims call it,” the guy said. “You don’t happen to be a Muslim, do you? By any chance?”

Rudy thought of Liliane and was sorry she had to see his city at this particular inglorious moment. “I’m the rich terrorist who’s pouring all my piles of gold into the project,” Rudy said. “Can’t you tell?”