The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(87)

My piano piece came as a relief in those early days. Something about those twelve acrobats in Marrakesh had so moved me that I was still thinking about them years later and a continent away. They each performed a solitary act, and yet the effect would only be achieved when viewed in unison. I had never belonged to any tribe, and perhaps I would never be able to, but I could try to put that feeling in my music. I worked for hours on end, sometimes coming out into the dining room to find that night had fallen, and the breakfast dishes were still on the table. I’d reheat a frozen pizza, eat it standing at the sink, and return to the piano.



* * *



—

One morning in August, just before I had to leave for Silverwood, I went to the post office to fill out a hold-mail form. The walk was less than a mile, but along the way I noticed that the little store that sold Ethiopian coffee was expanding into a café, the Korean restaurant my friend Anissa and I had gone to for her birthday had been turned into a sushi bar, and the yoga studio had moved. As I waited for the light at the intersection, I thought about what else had changed over the summer: I didn’t have to fill in applications for teaching jobs in the fall, I was featured in a major music festival, I lived by myself.

Then the light turned red, but instead of crossing, I continued another three blocks toward La Coccinelle. I’m just going to walk past it, I told myself. Nothing more. It would be good to take a longer morning stroll, get a little exercise before the next day’s flight to Boston. But as I got closer to the coffee shop, the terms and conditions of that promise began to shift. If Max Bloemhof is there, I said as silently as I might a prayer, I will go in and talk to him.

When I arrived at the café, I spotted my neighbor Andrew sitting with his laptop by the window. He was working on a dissertation about the upper-class Victorian gentleman’s attempt at constructing masculinity through fashion—a topic that had sounded legitimate, even interesting, when he’d told me about it, but that would seem completely preposterous to anyone back home in the Mojave. In the cozy armchair was Lena, working on her food blog while her blueberry scone sat untouched. And next to her was a kid whose name I had never learned because he always wore headphones and never looked up from his drafting notebook. I stood behind the window, my eyes traveling from table to table, looking for Max. Finally, I spotted his jacket at an empty table under the gilded wall clock. He always liked that spot, because it was farthest from the bustle of the ordering line. In a few quick steps, I went through the front door and was standing at his table. The clinking of a cup behind me made me turn, but instead of Max coming to the table, along came his wife, Evelyn.

They had been married seventeen years. Their oldest son’s age, plus eight months. The marriage had been a mistake, Max had often told me, something he’d been forced into when he realized Evelyn was pregnant. They were both Dutch, both visiting professors in a small college in Texas, both unhappy that they had ended up in one of the most conservative states in the country. But less than a year later, his book Before Night Comes was published. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became a bestseller. Evelyn landed a tenure-track job at the San Francisco Art Institute. They bought a house. Their daughter was born. Whenever Max told me this story, he made it sound as though one event had led to the next, without his having played much of a role in what happened.

Evelyn’s hair was longer now, and she was wearing a chunky turquoise necklace that verged on gaudy, but otherwise she had the same professorial look she had about her the only other time we had met, at a reading in San Francisco nearly a year before. The bookstore was crowded that night, so I hadn’t seen her until after I’d put my hand on Max’s arm and leaned in to say hello. She’d fixed her hazel eyes on me and I immediately withdrew my hand. Max did the introductions and made some small talk, but very quickly he maneuvered her through the crowd to the front row, leaving me behind. Now Evelyn was at his table, carrying his cup of Earl Grey tea and a plate of pastries. “You,” she said.

“I—”

Words failed me. I had wanted to see Max to find out if he still stirred feelings in me, but instead Evelyn had appeared. She set the tea on the table and considered me for a moment, a half smile on her face, before she reached back and slapped me, hitting me so hard that my ears rang. Everyone turned to look.

“Stay away from us,” she said.

Without a word, I turned around and left. All the way back to my apartment, my hands inside the pockets of my hoodie were balled into fists. At home, I went straight to the storage closet in the hallway and pulled out my suitcase. With an efficiency that came from years of practice, I started packing, carefully avoiding my reflection in the mirror above the dresser. Never before had I felt more alone.





Maryam




Ramadan was difficult that year—not because of its many deprivations or because it fell in the middle of the summer, when the days were long, but because I missed my husband so much. Yet the fast had a healing effect on me, too, each sunrise and sunset restoring a little more of my peace, so that, by the time Eid arrived, I finally gathered up the courage to take care of something I had been dreading. I started in the garage, thinking it would be easy to discard the transistor radio missing its knobs or the boxes overflowing with old magazines, but these immediately brought back memories of the donut shop, with the two of us listening to music, flipping through Newsweek and Time, looking for news of home.