Don't Cry: Stories (22 page)

mother by acting out scenes from Glengarry Glen Ross. In the story, the dutiful son was the favorite. In real life, it was Caleb.

He came suddenly close to a coiled snake and, stepping away from it too fast, stumbled and fell, banging his knees and hands. Too quickly, he clawed for purchase and cut his palm on a rock. The snake slithered away. He cursed as he stood.

In the story, the brothers got drunk and had a fistfight on the lawn. In real life, they did the dishes together. In the story, the architect makes the do-good brother realize he’s giving himself away to win his mother’s love. The do-gooder makes the architect realize he’s riding free while his brother does the work of keeping the family together. In real life, no one realized anything.

"It’s very good,” said Janice. “Though I’m not sure the mother’s feelings would be so clear-cut”

Sweating and irritated, he emerged from the path. Here was a clearing, an overlook. There was no way to go farther up, though there was another way down. He sat on a rock and breathed deeply Either he had reached the top ahead of Kevin or he was lost. Either way was okay. From somewhere came rustling, the sound of rubbing cloth and parting limbs; Kevin had come. “You beat me, he said.

"For once,” replied Joseph.

Kevin smiled and sat beside the rock, dropping his pack beside him. Joseph passed the water; Kevin drank. They sat a long time

silently, looking at the grass, the trees, the sky. A bird, black in the distance, flew gracefully from one point to the next, dipping almost out of sight before rising again. Kevin leaned back on his elbows, legs stretched out before him. Joseph felt warmth for his friend; he felt good that they had finally reconnected.

“So, do you think you’ll stay in touch with Janice?'” Kevin tilted his head slightly up and back, glimpsing at Joseph with a sliver of eye.

“I don’t know, maybe a little. It wasn’t a social relationship; she was my professor.”

“Students keep in touch with teachers.”

“Are you going to keep in touch with anyone?”

“Yeah, Don and I will definitely be in touch. I want to follow his work in the Middle East, maybe go over there with them.”

“Wow,” said Joseph, “that would be incredible.” He thought of Kevin’s mother, one son already in Iraq. The Odyssey rushed to the front of his thoughts; he remembered how, when a soldier had been killed, the narrative had stopped to say who his mother was and what kind of blanket she had wrapped him in when he was a baby

“I have to tell you something,” said Kevin. “I feel like I have to tell you.”

“What?”

“ I slept with Janice.” jWhatf

“I fucked Braver.”

“"You’re lying.”

“Why would I lie?”

“But you didn’t like her. She didn’t like you.”

“She liked me.” “When did this supposedly happen?”

“The weekend before the graduation ceremony”

That weekend: Joseph had been at that party, too. Everyone was at that party, all the grad students and most of the faculty Everyone was drunk. Late at night, he had been surprised to see Janice and Kevin talking in a corner: Kevin was leaning close to Janice and she was looking up at him with a strange naked expression on her face. He had not paid further attention because he was trying to get a girl to give him her number.

“But you said you didn’t like her.” Joseph stood up. “You made a whole huge point of not liking her.”

Kevin stayed sitting on the ground. “I didn’t like her as a teacher. I liked her as a woman.”

“She’s married. She’s old enough to be your mom.”

“No, she’s not. She’s forty-eight.”

Kevin stood up. “Why should I care about that? It was good, for one night. We both understood it was for one night.”

“I don’t want to hear details.”

“Who said anything about details?”

Kevin turned away abruptly He walked to the edge of the overlook and bent to pick up a rock. Joseph wanted to kick him. Kevin threw the rock over the edge, hard, like a little boy with something to prove. Joseph wanted to kick him in the ass. Kevin turned around; his face was startled and soft. The kicking urge went away Kevin spoke mildly. “Do you want to go back down your way?” he asked.

“No,” said Joseph. “It’s all slipperyrock.”

But Kevin’s way was slippery, too; almost immediately, Joseph stumbled and fell against him. Kevin staggered and nearly went down; anger flashed in his eyes.

Joseph said, “Why didn’t you tell about Janice until now?"

“She made me promise not to.”

“But you’re telling it now.”

“The semester’s over. You just said you’re not really going to stay in touch with her. It doesn’t seem like it matters now”

Joseph tried to concentrate on his footsteps. Instead, he thought of Janice naked, in sexual positions. He had never thought of her that way before.

“So, how was it?” he asked,

Kevin didn’t answer. His broad back expressed an upright reticence that was somehow dirtier than dirtiness.

“Did she like it?”

“It seemed like she did.” He paused and then added, as if he couldn’t help it, “Even though she cried.”

Semicrouched, Joseph stopped. “Why? Why did she cry?”

Kevin turned and slipped a litde. “I thought you didn’t want to hear details.”

“I don’t.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Kevin. “Did you like her or something?” “Not like that,” said Joseph.

“Then what..

“It isn’t anything, I just...” He thought of Janice with her legs spread. He did not see her face or her upper body, only her spread lower half. “I just want you to go on down,” he said quietly. “I’ll come in a bit.”

“Okay.”

The sky had changed. The clearing was now covered with soft shadows broken by slow-moving light. Joseph sat on the stone and put his head in his hands. His thoughts of Jamce faded. He thought

of Marisa, how she had asked not to feel sorry for him, when it was clear she didn’t. He thought of holding her from behind, her breasts in his hands. He dropped his hands and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. In truth, no one knew if his mother was well, or if she still had cancer. They could not find cancer now, but one day she might go to the doctor to check and cancer would be there again. She would have to check and check always.

He stood up, looking into the valley Giant broken rocks fell motionless down the incline, harsh gray stippled with black moss, shadow deeply pitting the spaces between the raw chunks. Broken trees stumbled down the slope, half-living, half-dead. At the bottom, only the living parts were visible, converged in the crease of the valley like virile hair at the fork of the body.

He pictured Caleb acting for his mother in the living room, making her laugh. It wasn’t what Caleb said that made her laugh; it was something in his voice that, without his trying, touched her somewhere that Joseph couldn’t reach.

He looked up at a flat field of clouds hanging low in the sky, rippled with soft gray; above them, bright light massed together as if trying to give itself a shape, like a sound trying to form a word. Above this light rose pale sky that deepened and turned blue as it rose higher into cloudlessness. He thought, Kevin would always win. That’s just how it was. Radiance shone, receded, and shone again.

Our first day in Addis Ababa, we woke up to wedding music playing outside the hotel. We had traveled for twenty hours and we were deeply asleep. The music entered my sleep in the form of moving lights, like fireflies or animate laughter, in a pattern, but a loose and playful one. I was dreaming that I was with Thomas. In the dream, he was very young and we were chasing a light that had come free of the others, running down a winding path with darkness all around.

When I woke, at first I did not know where I was. The music seemed more real than the dingy room; its sound saturated me with happiness and pain. Then I saw Katya and remembered where we were and why. She was already up and standing at the window, lifting a shade to peer out—the sun made a warm place on her skin and I felt affection for her known form in this unknown place. She turned and said, “Janice, there’s weddings going on outside—plurall”

We went outside. All around our hotel were gardens, and in the gardens were crowds of people dressed in the bright colors of undiluted joy. Brides and grooms were wearing white satin, and the streets were lined with white limousines decked with flowers, and together with so much color, the white also seemed colorful. Little girls in red-and-white crinoline ran past, followed by a laughing

woman. Everyone was laughing or smiling, and because I could not tell where the music came from, I had the sensation that it was coming directly from these smiling, laughing people. Katya turned to me and said, “Are we in heaven?”

I replied, “I don’t know,” and for a second I meant it.

My husband, Thomas, had died six months before the trip to Addis Ababa. The music that woke me that first day touched my grief even before I knew it was wedding music. Even in my sleep, I could hear love in it; even in my sleep, I could hear loss. I stepped out of the hotel in a state of grief, but when I saw the brides and grooms in their happiness, wonder spread slowly through my grief. It was like seeing my past and a future that was no longer mine but that I was part of anyway

In the dirty hotel restaurant, we had dry bricklike croissants and lots of good fruit—papaya, mangoes, bananas, oranges, and pineapple. The coffee was burnt, so we decided to go to the espresso place we’d been told was just a few blocks away. We never found the place, although we walked a long time: At first, we walked on a crowded street made of pavement, with department stores, an Internet cafe, and a grocery with a big Magic Marker drawing (green and red) of fruit and vegetables in the window. Starving dogs wandered freely. The pavement abruptly fell off and gave way to rocks. We saw another wedding party, in a Mercedes decked with rich-colored flowers, moving through a herd of donkeys, the herders lagging behind, talking on their cells. Beggars swarmed around us, shouting and showing us their deformed limbs, their blind eyes. We forgot our espresso. The rocky street gave way to dirt with pools of muddy water. Houses, patched together with tin, plastic, canvas, and wood, bulged out. sagged in, lurched and leaned this way, then that. Beggars swarmed us, chanting. Wedding guests in gold pants and silky shirts pushed their broken car through slowly parting pedestrians. A little boy marched along blowing a horn; he was followed by a smaller boy, who was shouting and rhythmically shaking a clutch of bells on a strap. The smell of fresh shit rose up suddenly and mixed with the odors of sweat and cooked meat. An old woman seated in the roots of a giant tree sold bundled sticks and dresses mounted on smiling white mannequins. Trees made soft, blunt, deep green shapes with their boughs. Katya turned to me, her face dazed. "We’d better go back,” she said. “We’re getting lost.”

Katya was in Ethiopia to adopt a baby; I was there to help her. Katya had asked me to go with her because I am one of her oldest friends, going back to our waitressing days in Manhattan. She is a narrow little woman with a broad, bossy air: ugly-beautiful, full lower lip a bit too pendulous, hips and breasts small but highly charged, black hair big, curly, and shining with secreted oil. The restaurant we’d worked in was run by Mafia thugs, and they would sometimes come in before the shift to do coke with us. The head thug really liked Katya; he would confide in her and ask her advice and she would console him and boss him around.

In those days, I was putting myself through a writing program; she was having experiences. I got married and turned into an English professor who publishes stories in quarterly magazines. She started various businesses, which she either failed at or got bored with and sold. She had family money to begin with, and in spite of the failures along the way, she has actually amassed some money of her own. She now runs a boutique in D.C., which is where she lives. She has made some Ethiopian friends, one of whom, a

woman named Meselu, runs a “big woman’s* store across the street from Katya’s business.

Katya had been thinking of adoption for some time; she didn’t want to go through an agency in America because it pissed her off that while agencies gave the birth mother full disclosure regarding the adoptive parent, there was no reciprocity. She didn’t want to go through a foreign agency because most of them required a two-year wait, and she felt that, at forty-nine, she was already too old. She had learned through someone on the Internet—a woman in California who’d already adopted an Ethiopian child—that independent adoptions there were relatively easy. It helped, of course, that Meselu could hook her up with people in Addis Ababa, including a driver named Yonas, who specialized in clients there to adopt.

When Katya asked me if I would go to Africa with her, I said yes, because Thomas had died four months earlier and I had still not gone back to teaching. In the emptiness of my life, it didn’t seem to matter what I did; between doing nothing and doing something, it seemed better to do something. Thomas and I had never had children, and, maybe without thinking about it, I wanted to help my friend give a child safe passage. Katya had never been lucky with men and I knew she had always envied my marriage; perhaps I was hoping to balance my loss with something good for her. In any case, before I left I took Thomas’s wedding ring from the altar I had made in our bedroom, took my own ring from my finger, and put them both on a gold chain around my neck.

When Yonas came to pick us up at the hotel, he told us that every Saturday at this time of year, people in Addis Ababa come out to get married, and that our hotel was an especially popular spot because of the gardens. Yonas was a young man with a beautiful face and a profound feeling of age about him. When we told him how heavenly the weddings had seemed to us, he gravely bobbed his head and made the quick, sharp inhalation that we were beginning to understand meant yes. He held the door of his rattling Soviet car for us and said something I couldn’t understand. We got in, sank into the broken, reeking cushions, down almost to the floor.

We couldn’t go to the orphanage on a Saturday, so Yonas took us up into the mountains, a trip I remember in the way I remember my dream that morning. I remember getting out of the car to stand at the top of a steep street, with big broken stones on each side of us, and looking down at a jumble of shanties and tiny houses careering up and down a hill. Farther out of the city, we saw houses made of mud and gray thatch that appeared soft as hair from a distance; there was one house surrounded by a beautiful fence made of light, slender branches of all shapes and sizes linked in a winding, nearly musical pattern, varied by the curves of certain branches that suddenly and softly digressed before returning to the music of the pattern. Big flowers grew through the branches in random places, spilling their pink petals. There was a woman in the yard with abright red scarf on her head. The sky was full of soft, swollen clouds.