A Handbook to Luck (16 page)

“She loves babies but she can't have one of her own. You'd be doing me a big favor.”

“I'll talk to my wife.”

“Sí, claro.”

A truck rumbled by, making the earth tremble. Enrique let his cigar die out. He was sweating profusely, he didn't know why. Papi was coming for another visit next week. They hadn't seen each other since the disastrous tournament last year. Enrique had finally lashed out at his father in front of everyone:
You killed Mamá and don't have the courage to admit it! You call it terrible luck, or a huge tragedy, or a curse from God-knows-where but it's never your own damn fault!
Papi was so stricken by this accusation that he staggered backward, knocking over a food trolley, and scurried out of the casino without saying a word.

The next morning Papi showed up at the casino in his civilian clothes, freshly showered and shaved, and greeting everyone. He took Enrique aside as if nothing bad had happened.
Gracias, hijo. I couldn't have asked for a better son.
Then he gave Enrique a photograph of Mamá standing on the deck of a ship, her hair flying everywhere.
She was your same age here, hijo. We were just married and she was already pregnant with you. She looks happy, no?
This made Enrique even more furious with his father—furious for making him feel guilty; furious for not having shown him this picture before. How many more of these did he have hidden? But it was impossible to stay angry with him for long.

For one thing, Papi's health was plummeting. On top of his usual ailments he had an ulcer, suspicious new skin tags, and grew tired walking across a ballroom. Fernando was becoming what seemed unthinkable to them both: an old man. This afflicted Enrique more than anything. He tried encouraging his father to eat healthily (“Give up steak,
hijo
? Have you gone mad?”) and exercise (“What do you mean ‘walk'? Walk to where?”), but Papi dismissed his suggestions. He considered aerobics—the word irritated him beyond reason—a pastime ill-suited for cultured men.

Papi's only form of exercise was women. It didn't surprise Enrique that his father's latest girlfriend was thirty years younger than him. Violeta Salas was a Nicaraguan waitress at the Sahara Hotel and a former Sandinista guerrilla. (Papi made political exceptions for beautiful women.) He went to great pains to keep his age a secret from Violeta, avoiding senior citizen discounts and early-bird specials, which he'd formerly patronized with gusto. (It must've killed him to pay full price.) Afternoons in Las Vegas, the Great Court Conjurer announced to his sexy new love, were for the already decrepit.

One of his impresario friends was financing Papi's latest project: marketing the Ching Ling Foo Magic Kit. Enrique often caught his father pitching the kit on late-night television, between the oldies albums and the automatic vegetable peelers. Papi reveled in the idea of millions of anonymous, insomniac eyes on him and he expected to make a fortune. Didn't people retire on more ridiculous things? The last shot of the commercial showed Papi spewing fire from his mouth, then grinning at the camera with blackened teeth: “For only $29.95 plus tax you, too, can become world-famous like Ching Ling Foo!”

Outside, a moist breeze stirred the palm trees lining the casino entrance. Colorful pendants fluttered on crisscrossing lines. The grass was still wet from the sprinklers. A helicopter rattled over South Central, swinging its cone of light. It was impossible to see any stars beyond the low-slung clouds and the competing glare of casino neon. At this hour, Enrique felt the absence of everything. He missed his mother especially, and tormented himself that he'd done nothing to save her life. It didn't matter that he'd only been six years old.

What he understood now was this: the night was black and blanketing, soft on his neck, gathering him in, revealing nothing. It was as if he existed alone, in a vacuum, untethered to anything real—sunlight, or grass, or his wife's dwindling embraces. He couldn't hear his breath, or his heart, and he felt the silence go through him like a freight train. The day's first light seemed to him unbearably sad. Enrique longed to protect his wife and daughters, but so much could go unpredictably wrong. Sometimes his fear kept him awake at night, hanging like a bat in the back of his brain. He tried to calm down by thinking of round things: beach balls and pita bread, hula hoops, the smallest coins. It didn't help.

He got in his car, a brand-new Buick, and put the key in the ignition. The radio blasted a song he immediately recognized:
Well, I woke up this morning, and I got myself a beer. The future's uncertain, and the end is always near.
He could see Leila vividly again, singing off-key, the sweet encasement of her beige cashmere sweater. Enrique felt the lyrics stirring in the back of this throat, but he held off singing them. If he started to sing, he might not stop—and where would that leave him?

Nothing was ever the same twice, he decided, not happiness, not hurting. Enrique turned off the radio and rolled down the window. Then he sped toward the highway, his headlights illuminating dust motes and moths. A waft of night jasmine gave him a jolt. Was he smelling the jasmine or merely remembering it? It didn't really matter. In fifteen more minutes, he told himself, he would be home.

Leila Rezvani

I
t had been a mild winter in Tehran. Despite the air raids, the vendor on the corner grilled his corn over an electric heater and the walnut man peddled his shelled nuts in salted water. Birds started appearing in gardens and on telephone poles, unsettling the beds of red tulips. A flock of parrots chattered restlessly in the budding maple trees between the British embassy and the Hotel Naderi. All this made Leila believe again in the promises of spring, although it never did her any good.

It was nearly midnight. Mehri was asleep, snoring like her father with her lower lip caught on the edge of the pillow. The house was peaceful without Sadegh. Leila preferred it when he was away on business. There was more oxygen in the air, even with the windows shut tight. She was less afraid of everything, too—of the
komiteh,
and the patrolling vice squads (who'd taken to throwing acid in the faces of women who wore too much makeup), and the threat of bombs from Iraqi planes. Yes, her husband's absence made even the war with Iraq more bearable.

Leila lit a candle and toured her home in the dark. Tuberoses filled every vase, giving off a vague scent of death. The crystal chandelier refracted the flame in the dining room mirror, reminding Leila of the lights of merry-go-rounds. As a child, she used to sit in her father's lap at the circus and eat cotton candy and pistachios. They both loved the elephants and the tiger tamers best. Baba had told her something then that Leila hadn't understood until this moment: It's human nature to love even what doesn't return love.

In the kitchen, Leila startled the maid, who was sitting with a cup of tea and a hunk of that morning's
sangak.
The television was on. On the news, a group of veiled mothers whose boys had died in the war were celebrating their martyrdom, crying with joy and holding one another. Were they mad with grief?

“Excuse me, madam, what can I get for you?”

“Nothing, Zari. I just thought I heard a noise.”

“It's my stomach grumbling. You know I need to eat a little something before bed or I can't sleep.” Zari peeled a hardboiled egg and stood up to reheat some sour cherry rice from dinner.

“Yes, of course. No more moths?”

“Thank God, they're all gone.”

Yesterday there had been a strange infestation of moths in the kitchen. Nobody could figure out where they'd come from. Dozens of them, small and luminous with brown markings on their wings, fluttered in the damp air like so many petals. It took the maid and the gardener, an amateur lepidopterist, an hour to round them up with his butterfly net.

Leila climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. There were four bedrooms along this hallway. The guest room for Sadegh's parents was first, with its astronomer's map of the heavens painted onto the ceiling. The map had been Leila's idea. She liked to imagine following the long trail of Eridanus to the other side of the universe, or sitting on Polaris and watching the slowly rotating planets. Sadegh objected to her decorating as an unnecessary extravagance, but he showed off the ceiling to every visitor.

It wasn't easy adjusting to life in Iran. As if the war weren't dangerous enough, she and Sadegh had gotten into nine car accidents between them their first year back. Red lights, friends had warned them, were meant only as suggestions. There was no such thing as traffic lanes either, much less staying in them. A blare of the horn or a clenched fist took the place of turn signals. It was a miracle they hadn't been killed. The government had finally agreed to provide Sadegh with a full-time chauffeur, the very one who'd driven him to Arak on Tuesday. Not that the chauffeur drove better than anyone else.

An American-trained nuclear physicist like Sadegh was in great demand in Iran. This was why he'd decided to stay after his brother's funeral. Everybody kissed his feet, especially once he began reporting directly to the head of the Nuclear Energy Commission. Sadegh basked in the attention and special privileges. For all the talk of freedom, he'd felt imprisoned in America. Here he could be a real man again.

Leila wanted to find work as well, but her husband refused to give her permission. He liked seeing her in a chador, voluminously entombed in black, captive and invisible. Was this what men really wanted? Sadegh hated the tight jeans Leila had favored in the States, which, he said, exhibited her whorish tendencies.
Jendeh.
How many times had she been called a whore, first by her mother and now by her husband?

Leila missed Los Angeles, missed the peculiar gray of the Pacific, the seabirds plunging into the waves at dusk, her weekend scuba diving trips. Mostly, she missed the sense of possibility, of one day being different from the next. Why had she given up her freedom to marry Sadegh? What had it brought her except the world circling around her deadening heart?

The second room along the upstairs hallway was her husband's. It was painted a deep blue and had gold-plated accents: doorknobs, faucets, bureau pulls. Sadegh liked to joke—it was his only one—that everything he touched was gold. Mehri's room, with its sunflower-stenciled walls and giant microscope, was next. Sometimes Leila randomly opened the atlas on her daughter's desk and tried to picture the places beneath her fingertips. Leipzig. Harare. Brunei. She never got further than the taste of the names on her tongue.

This afternoon, Leila had taken Mehri to the amusement park on the outskirts of the city. It was less crowded than she'd expected for a Friday. Mehri begged to go on the Ferris wheel and Leila relented, against her better judgment. The contraption was fifty years old, straining and screeching with each revolution, and a heavy smell of oil drifted off its engine. High above the ground, Leila tried to discern the Ferris wheel's melody but it sounded generically carnival. Overhead, jackdaws shredded the feathery clouds.

The Ferris wheel lurched to a halt as they neared the top. Mehri was delighted and rocked their gondola back and forth, leaning into the gray light. It began to drizzle, though not enough to wet anything significantly. Down below, a couple of umbrellas gloomily bloomed.

“Maybe we'll stay up here forever!” Mehri shouted.

A red balloon floated past them, just beyond their reach. A girl wailed inconsolably at the base of the ride. Leila and Mehri watched the balloon drift higher and higher until it was no more than a speck of blood in the sky. Then it was gone.

“Did the balloon go to heaven?” Mehri asked.

“Only people go to heaven.”

“What about fish?”

“Fish don't go to heaven.” Leila turned to her daughter. Her round face was flushed and happy, and her nose flared like a mongoose pup's.

“What if they did?”

“You don't have to worry about that, Mehri
joonam.
”

When the Ferris wheel started up again, the jerky movements made her daughter laugh. How Leila loved Mehri's abandoning laugh. These days, it was the only thing that sustained her.

The last room on the hallway was Leila's. It was closet-sized, intended for a servant, with no windows and a cupboard for storage. On her nightstand stood an empty bud vase. Leila went inside and locked the door. Most nights she slept with her daughter, except when her in-laws visited. Then Sadegh would insist that they sleep together for appearance's sake. Once a month he came looking for her in Mehri's room. Leila would feel the rough tug of his hand on her shoulder and follow him, dutifully, to his bedroom.

If she was lucky, Sadegh would be sound asleep within minutes. If she was unlucky, he would blame his impotence on her. Sometimes he would force her to suck him for an hour or more. All the while he would tell her how ugly she was, how her skin had lost its suppleness, how her ass was flat as a serving tray. Sadegh complained that she offered him no encouragement and threatened to supplement her attentions with a
havoo,
a temporary wife, a juicy woman to stir his manhood. Leila prayed that he would.

Leila had left the hospital only a few days ago. On the night of Baba's sixty-fifth birthday, she'd collapsed at her Aunt Parvin's house. The clandestine party had reminded her of prerevolutionary times: platters of caviar, designer evening gowns, seventies disco music. One minute Leila was dancing to “Staying Alive” and the next thing she knew, she was waking up in a hospital room choked with a funeral's worth of flowers. Even her mother heard about the incident and sent a telegram from London, reminding her that a lady refrained from making a public spectacle of herself.

Dr. Banuazizi, her attending physician and a close friend of Baba's, told Leila that she was suffering from nervous exhaustion and advised her to give up cigarettes. It was true that her lungs ached from smoking and the chronic pollution. But what else was she supposed to do for her nerves?

Leila didn't want Sadegh visiting her in the hospital, but nobody could deny him the right to see his wife. Every evening he barged in carrying a box of dried apricots (he knew she hated them) and demanded to see her charts. Leila trembled so badly that the tubes in her arm made the IV bottles clatter. Sadegh was furious with her. People were whispering that he couldn't control his wife. How dare she embarrass him like that?

Leila sat on her narrow bed and considered the ways the weak lied to the strong. How many lives were like hers, based on capitulation, on the threat of violence and disgrace? She retrieved the book of Farrokhzad's poetry she'd borrowed from Baba's library and found, as always, a sad solace there:
I cried all day in the mirror. Spring had entrusted my window to the trees' green delusions.

Her childhood friend Yasmine had found her own solution to the mullahs: never to marry. She rejected every suitor who came calling (though they were fewer in number these days) and lived in a wing of her parents' house. She worked part-time as a computer consultant, coming and going as she pleased. She refused to participate in what she called the “culture of lies.” On weekends, Yasmine went hiking with her girlfriends in the Alborz Mountains and cooked in the open air. To her, surviving in Iran was all a game.

Yasmine harshly criticized Leila's marriage: “You are like a drum, a
tabl.
He beats on you and you produce a sound.” Leila knew that her friend was right.

There was black-market Turkish vodka in the cupboard, tucked in among her fancy underthings: silk teddies, push-up bras, garter belts from her more sexually optimistic days. It was a miracle she'd managed to smuggle them into the country. Leila poured herself a double shot of vodka and unbuttoned her blouse. She looked down at her wilted breasts, ruined from nursing Mehri, against her mother's advice. Absently, she rolled a nipple between her thumb and forefinger. The puckered skin of her stomach looked like orange rind.

Her bottle of tranquilizers was kept hidden in the nightstand drawer next to the silver bracelet Enrique had given her. He'd said the bracelet had belonged to his mother, that she'd worn it on the day she died. Leila had thought him morbid for giving her his dead mother's jewelry. Only recently had she begun to appreciate the great sacrifice of his gift.

Leila shook out two peach-colored pills and swallowed them with a gulp of vodka. The pills, Dr. Banuazizi promised, would help her take care of Mehri and become a better wife to Sadegh, would help her keep her mouth shut, help her cope with the war and the lack of color everywhere, with the streets renamed for martyrs. Perhaps the pills would help her, ultimately, forget who she was.

After a second drink, Leila dimmed the lights and tugged off her skirt and panties. She thought of her mother's garden long ago, of the silent company of the flowers and the fragrant fruit trees. The leaves and petals lay scattered on the dirt paths and the summer winds would gust them into low-swirling eddies of pinks and greens. It seemed to Leila that she'd been truly happy then. She had no idea what happiness would look like to her now.

Often, she fantasized about returning to California. She wanted to scuba dive again, finish her degree. But what sort of life would be possible? To support herself, she would need to work twelve hours a day. More and more, she wondered about Enrique. Was he married? Did he have children? Was he still in Las Vegas playing poker? Tomorrow, Leila decided, she would write him a letter and find out.

But what was she thinking? Sadegh would never grant her a divorce and the laws were all in his favor. She could fight him in court, but even with the considerable influence of Baba and his friends, she might still lose Mehri entirely. Then where would she be? Trapped in Iran, without her daughter, or prospects, or work (Sadegh would make certain of this), and utterly dependent on her aging father.

Leila licked her forefinger and slipped it between her legs. The moistness surprised her, as if a separate life existed there, far from her worries. Perhaps the body knew more than the mind about what was good. Most days, she was so removed from her flesh that it startled her to rediscover it. She remembered how Enrique had kissed her hand after their accident in the Mojave. How soft his lips had been, how tender. Later, his lips had memorized every inch of her skin. If only she could stretch her loneliness to reach him.

The image of Enrique was interrupted by another one: a circle of stern-faced mullahs eagerly watched Leila touch herself, whips in one hand, Korans in the other.
Marg bar Amrika.
Death to America. It was necessary for them to make an example of her, to administer many lashes for her transgressions.
Allah-o-Akbar!
Together they shouted this again and again. One of the mullahs reached for Leila and tried to force his finger inside her as the others urged him on.
Bale! Bale!
She felt herself opening like a violet in the rain.