A Handbook to Luck (14 page)

The sun glared down on the city as Enrique crossed King Street. He tried to picture the colonial town houses in their heyday, the balconies draped with hibiscus and coral vines, not degenerated into tenements pockmarked with bullet holes. At the far end of Ocean Boulevard, the rickety wharves were swarming with pelicans. Buzzards banked and wheeled in the distance, loose-stitching rips in the sky. Did they bring bad luck, like in Cuba?

Around him, everything breathed a futile abundance. Farmers, their legs pure sinew, toted their bundles of firewood and baskets of yams from the Jubilee Market. Goats nosed along the filthy alleyways, browsing in garbage cans. A pigeon with a ripped wing was dead on a doorstep, bruising the hour. The air was so viscous it felt three-dimensional. Enrique's lungs pumped hard walking just a short way. The tropical metabolism was simple: devour and grow.

The palm trees along the boulevard looked painted in place. Even the sea was unconvincing, though it couldn't have been more than a couple hundred yards away. Enrique clasped his head hard, then punched the air for no reason. He was still feeling stoned. Smoking a Cuban cigar—they were easy to get in Kingston—would clear his head. He thought of pirates' maps with big X's for where the treasures lay buried. He wanted a map like that for his own life, one that showed his precise location and what he had to do to find the gold.

Enrique settled into a wicker chair at another funky, open-air rum shop. He ordered a ginger beer, chasing it with a double shot of rum and a plate of salt-fish cakes. Rust had claimed most of the rum shop's tin roof. Last year's girlie calendar fluttered in the breeze. A transistor radio crackled listlessly. Enrique combed his hair with damp fingers and took a long swallow of a second beer. He leaned back and noticed the early moon, faint beyond the blue-green hills. Hurricane season wouldn't begin for another month.

Just before dusk, Enrique decided to visit Bob Marley's grave. He'd heard that when Marley had died earlier this year, his body had been laid out in his denim suit and tam, a Bible in one hand, his guitar in the other. The cortege stretched for fifty miles.

There were a couple of punk rockers at Marley's grave, alongside beggar kids, red-haired from malnutrition. Apparently, anybody who was anybody in punk was making the pilgrimage to Jamaica for inspiration. A stiff wind made everyone's clothes flap. A girl in a lavender miniskirt and tank top was laying a bouquet of calla lilies on Marley's grave. She was short and her legs were tightly muscled. Her friendliness caught Enrique off guard.

“Do I know you?” she asked.

Nobody had ever asked him that before. It turned out that she was Cuban, born in Pinar del Río, although she'd grown up in the States. Her name was Delia Barredo and she'd come all the way from New Jersey to pay her respects to Bob Marley. She credited his music with inspiring her to leave secretarial school and study modern dance. Enrique liked the artful way she paused between sentences.

The wind scattered Delia's lilies and Enrique retrieved them, tying them together with a length of vine. Then he returned them to the grave. He noticed orchids growing among the flamboyants, a hummingbird camouflaged by a clutch of torch ginger. Tacky had told him about a flower on the far side of the mountains that bloomed only once every thirty-three years. He'd been a teenager and in the first blush of love when he'd first seen them. “'Twas boonoonoonoos!”

When Delia asked Enrique what he did, he surprised himself by answering, “I'm a gambler.” Would it matter to her that he'd been accepted to MIT? That because of some computer glitch, they sent him a welcome-to-campus letter every August? He still flirted with going but the temptation faded more every year. Never mind. It felt good to be speaking Spanish with this
cubana.
Enrique tried to see inside Delia's eyes, but they didn't reveal much. Did prayers get answered so quickly or was this some kind of sick ecclesiastical joke?

On an impulse, Enrique invited Delia to check out the dance-hall scene later that night. But first, he asked her to dinner. She accepted calmly, as if it were no big deal. He liked this about her. The uptown restaurant served mostly continental cuisine but they chose the few Jamaican dishes on the menu: jerk chicken, coconut rice, cornmeal pudding for dessert. They shared a bottle of wine, too, the most expensive on the list. Enrique paid for everything with his gambling cash.

For a tiny woman, Delia ate a lot. Double portions of everything, with extra side dishes. She ate six fried plantains and a pint of Pickapeppa sauce. Delia told him that her father was a barber in Patterson and gave old-fashioned, straight-razor shaves. His real claim to fame, though, were his roast pork legs—marinated for six days with garlic and sour oranges—which he sold to other homesick Cubans at Christmastime. In his record year, 1977, he'd sold ninety-two legs.

Lady Cecilia was deejaying at the Crocodile Club and the place was jammed when they got there. It was like being inside an enormous mammal, hot and alive. The dress code for women was outrageous: as skimpy and as tight as possible. Delia looked positively Victorian in her lavender miniskirt. Enrique feared the force of his need and quickly lost himself dancing. Delia followed his every move. She was slight, like him, but had a curvy ass. He liked the feel of her pressed against him.

They danced every dance until they were soaked to the bones, until the soles of their feet ached and burned. At one point Lady Cecilia, her hair twisted with flashy gems, suggestively tried to swallow her microphone, rasping:
No soke wi' mi', no soke wi' mi'.
Enrique loved the way her words stacked up in one direction, then tumbled unexpectedly in another.

It was five in the morning when he and Delia left the Crocodile Club and found themselves laughing and kissing on the Kingston docks, their faces upturned to the last swirl of stars. Enrique could see the blue-and-white banners of his hotel nearby. He studied the peculiar beauty of Delia's face—the wide-set eyes and snub nose—now familiar in the cool, moist air. Soon the heat of the day would emerge from its resting places.

On the other side of the harbor, the casino ship waited, mammoth and looming from another world. “It sails in an hour,” Enrique said. He thought of how Delia's hips matched his. How she calmed his loneliness, his tribal fever.
Coño,
why torment himself with doubts? “Please,” he said. “Come with me.” Delia stroked his face like his mother used to do. Her eyes were an inch from his, bewildered at first, then purposeful and gray. And to Enrique's surprise, and to hers, she said, Yes.

Leila Rezvani

T
hey were still a hundred miles from home after a long weekend visiting the Grand Canyon. Little Mehri was asleep in her car seat and Sadegh was at the wheel. He hadn't said a word since they'd stopped for gas an hour ago. Maybe this was as good as it got, Leila thought, opening another box of sugar cookies: this deserted road; the sky heavy with stars; her hardworking husband and their nineteen-month-old daughter, who was a near carbon copy of him, only funnier.

“How's your headache?” Leila asked.

“Better.” Sadegh's tinted glasses hid the lack of expression in his eyes and made his baldness more prominent. Since they'd moved to New Mexico, her husband had lost most of his hair. Earlier in the day, he'd walked to the edge of the Grand Canyon and been overcome by a fierce migraine. He'd fallen to his knees and might have rolled to his death (Leila was thirty yards away with their daughter, admiring the view) if some war veteran's wheelchair hadn't inadvertently interfered. He said the pain had felt like a hatchet to the back of his skull.

Lightning flared in the clouds as they sped along the two-lane highway back to Los Alamos. Leila wasn't permitted to turn on the radio. It was another one of her husband's edicts. She was willing to listen to anything as long as it filled the gloomy air between them, but Sadegh hated music. He said it prevented him from thinking. He avoided alcohol and refused to dance, too. Leila joked that he was worse than the mullahs back home but her husband wasn't amused.

At their wedding, Maman had been radiant. Her daughter was marrying a fine young scientist with foreign degrees and a big future, someone she'd chosen herself. It was her greatest moment, the chance to show her friends and family and the remnants of Tehran society that, revolution or not, she'd done her job well. Sometimes Leila thought that the real choice hadn't been between Sadegh and Enrique but between pleasing her mother and pleasing herself.

During the ceremony, a happily married great-aunt on Sadegh's side of the family rubbed a sugar loaf over their heads to ensure prosperity. And Sadegh's father quoted loudly from
The Book of Kings
: “‘Sufficient unto women is the art of producing and raising sons as brave as lions.'” His parents showered them with fancy gifts—carpets from Kashan worth a fortune, a pair of rare lovebirds to celebrate their union, leather chests filled with linens and brocades. Only Sadegh's twin brother, Ahmed, didn't wish them well. His American wife was divorcing him in Ohio and taking custody of their children. Everyone said that he was depressed. All Ahmed said was that this couldn't have happened to him in Iran.

The reception was held at Aunt Parvin's house. Candles illuminated the garden's flower beds. Tables were decorated with ribbons and cascading roses. Liveried waiters served vintage wines and piled everyone's plates high with barbecued lamb. There were cream cakes and grapes, which were truly the color of emeralds. Fat goldfish swam in the fountain and the pool was covered with a wooden dance floor. A jazz band played old standards late into the night. It was, everyone agreed, the best postrevolution wedding ever.

On their honeymoon to the Caspian Sea, Sadegh wanted to make love to Leila all the time. But she felt the slightest excitement only if she imagined that it was Enrique giving her kisses, caressing her thighs, circling her nipples with his tongue. Sadegh had the hotel prepare romantic picnics for them, which he spread out on rugs under willow trees and near streams. Whenever he tried to coax Leila back to their room, she begged him to stay outdoors. Sadegh lovingly indulged her at first, but he soon grew impatient with her disinterest.

After graduating, Sadegh had accepted a research job at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first Iranian-born physicist ever to do so. Everyone said that this was an extraordinary coup for a new Ph.D. Sadegh had been tempted to stay in Tehran—everyone treated him like a big shot—but the scientists he knew urged him to seize the opportunity, to learn everything he could, then return to Iran and share it with them. Before they left for New Mexico, Maman took Leila aside and warned her:
Women are like fruit trees; they have to bear children or they'll wither.

In no time at all, Leila was pregnant.

Leila turned to look at her daughter in the backseat. It was impossible to tell that she'd been born seven weeks premature, wrinkled and irascible as an old rug merchant. Mehri was plump and round-faced now, and had the same beauty mark on her cheek as her father. Her hair was thin and straight, like his used to be; her hands precise replicas of his. Only her nose was like Leila's—her old nose, with the bump in the middle and the too long tip.

It was said that a baby's future was written on its forehead by an angel with invisible ink. This happened at the moment of birth and nothing anybody did could change it. If this was true then perhaps Leila was meant to have married Sadegh after all, meant to have his child, meant to live in this lonely corner of America. Perhaps it was written on her brow that she never really had a choice at all.

Today, Mehri was dressed in little overalls and a rainbow T-shirt, as feminine as she ever got. She didn't wear the frilly dresses her grandmother sent her from London except for the five minutes required for a family portrait. Leila feared that her daughter looked too masculine but Sadegh dismissed her concerns. He always defended Mehri, questioned Leila's judgment. He said he didn't want his daughter growing up to be another empty-headed woman.

Most of the mothers Leila knew in her neighborhood didn't work and had no interest in careers. Several had gone to college but not a single one had graduated. Leila was a semester shy of graduating herself. The summer after her junior year, she'd interned at an American company in San Diego, troubleshooting factory robots. There was something deeply satisfying about the order and logic of the work. In the first lonely months after Mehri was born, worn down from the round-the-clock baby care, Leila dreamed of running away, of returning to the robot factory. But Sadegh wouldn't hear of her working.

Leila reached for a can of warm cola and more sugar cookies. She'd gained fifty-two pounds during her pregnancy and hadn't lost an ounce of it. It was a relief to be so voluptuously invisible. What did she care what Sadegh thought of her shape? They passed a few saguaros, ghostly in the dark, hoarding their water for centuries. Leila loved the desert but it held no interest for her husband. Nothing in the natural world did—not the mountains, not the oceans, not any kind of flora or fauna.

She remembered how Enrique had appreciated the desert—the noon heat like a disease, the weight and respite of its endless dusks. If you let it, he'd said, the desert persuaded you of its hallucinations. Like him, she was intrigued by the extreme adaptations of plants and animals living so close to their own survival: the battalions of cacti; the lizards that shot blood from their eyes when alarmed; snakes so still they looked like sticks. What was the minimal amount of moisture any of them needed to stay alive?

“Long day tomorrow?” Leila asked Sadegh. Why did she still bother making conversation with him?

“Same as always,” he muttered.

Her husband was unhappy at Los Alamos. Although he'd tried to fit in, Sadegh didn't feel comfortable with the other scientists. Whenever he pointed out their mistakes, which was often, they jokingly called him Ayatollah, or worse, and ridiculed his accent. They blamed him for everything wrong in the world: the hostage crisis; the high price of gas. They made him feel ashamed of being Iranian. Sadegh started calling himself “Persian”—Persian like the poetry, and the miniatures, and the rugs.

Often, he complained to his twin brother, who was equally miserable in his job as the night supervisor at a Cleveland electrical plant. Leila overheard her husband reminiscing with Ahmed about the opium they'd smoked when they were teenagers. It was a family pastime, Sadegh maintained defensively. His parents still smoked opium every day. Obviously, it hadn't done them any harm. Then he turned to Leila, softening his tone: “We should try it sometime, my love. Maybe it would help you relax.”

Lately, Leila had been avoiding sex with her husband altogether. Perhaps it was her own fault that she found no pleasure in bed with him. Perhaps Enrique had spoiled her for good. In Baja they'd held each other belly to belly, thigh to thigh until the sun came up. He loved her smell, everything she said, the way she held her teacup. Was that love? Leila sadly remembered a fragment of a poem by that Persian poetess:
Those days of wonder at the body's secrets…

But there'd been more than her own feelings to consider, Leila reminded herself. She tried to imagine telling her parents about Enrique Florit, a gambler without a college degree, a man whose mother was dead and whose father was a Las Vegas magician. Impossible.

“How can you be so logical?” Enrique had pleaded with her on their last night together.

“I need to consider my future.”

“
I'm
your future.”

“Darling, please.”

Wasn't it better that she'd left Enrique while she still could? No matter his voice and his elegant wrists, the softness of his lips, the way he gently rested his head on her breasts. The odds of them lasting weren't good. So why was she still thinking about him?

Last Christmas she'd worked up the courage to ask Sadegh to go down on her. She told him she'd heard that most women climaxed this way. This enraged him. What real man would fall to his knees to please a woman, he demanded, licking and lapping at her like a dog? Who did she think he was? After listening to a sex therapist on a radio talk show, Leila suggested that they see a marriage counselor. He grew even more incensed. Talk to a stranger about such private matters? Was she mad?

It was midnight when Sadegh reached their turnoff. Their house was in a fast-growing development on the outskirts of Los Alamos. The community was laid out in a grid with three styles of homes, variations on a theme, costing within five thousand dollars of one another. The lawns were measured down to the inch and the aspen saplings were planted equidistantly along the streets. The maple tree in their backyard was growing tall from Leila's obsessive watering. Last summer, a new elementary school had opened down the road.

Leila recalled how her father used to criticize the Shah for setting apart a private school for his children. “The crown prince should have gone to public school. He should have kicked and he should have been kicked.” Maman defended the royals, insisting that the prince went to school with the children of the palace gardeners and cooks. Baba countered: “He must meet real people. He should have friends who are not from the court.” Why was she remembering this right now?

Shortly after she married Sadegh, her parents separated. Naturally, nobody was calling it that. Her mother had moved to London “temporarily” to escape the war and soothe her raw nerves. Rumors flew that she was seeing that English horticulturist from years ago, but who could prove this? To everyone's surprise, Maman took up painting watercolors. Leila hated to admit it, but her mother's still lifes weren't half bad. She'd sent them one of a dead pheasant for their first anniversary.

Baba was staying on in Tehran, bitterly alone. He ate only fried eggs with a little salt for dinner. He'd lost his appetite after an explosion at the local post office killed thirteen people. Body parts had flown everywhere, draping lampposts and automobiles. One man's hand, complete with a Swiss wristwatch, had landed on Baba's shoe. Baba had been carrying a sack of pomegranates from the market. He dropped them with such force that they burst open on the sidewalk, scattering crimson seeds.

The lights were on inside the house. A pickup truck with Ohio plates was parked in the driveway. The only person they knew from the Midwest was Sadegh's twin brother, Ahmed. Leila got out of the car and unbuckled Mehri's car seat. Sadegh shuffled up the walkway with their luggage and put the key in the door. Leila followed him, carrying their sleeping daughter.