I Think of You Page 6

  He’s very cute, though, as well as being rich. Once or twice he’s acted strange—all gloomy and smoky and wouldn’t speak at all—but mostly he’s fun to be with, except I don’t always know if he’s joking or what. He won’t ever talk—I mean, really TALK—about anything personal, but I guess it takes time to build up communication.

  What I’d like to do now is take a photo of him sleeping. The flash would wake him, though, and I haven’t got my tripod and his kit is down in the car. I’ll take lots of shots of him tomorrow. Maybe I’ll take a shot of him taking a shot of me. No, that should be a third person really, to make the point: a third person taking a photo of two people, hiding behind their cameras, shooting each other, with the trees and fallen leaves all around them and the lake in the background. It’s so beautiful up here. We’ve just caught the trees before they shed the last of their leaves.

  Well, I guess we’ll have a nice day tomorrow. I don’t know if he will want to go on the lake, but we’ll drive around it and he said there was a neat place in William Wordsworth’s hometown where we could have tea— that means tea and cakes here. I ought to go to bed if I’m going to be in any kind of shape in the morning. But I’m not sleepy. What I’d really like right now is a joint, but I’m fresh out. Okay, what I’ll do is, I’ll copy out these two poems now, then go to bed.

  I

  A Russian dissident sits across from me in the park.

  He must be a dissident because

  he’s Russian, and he’s

  here

  in New York City.

  Does he know that Central Park

  is

  muggers only

  after dark?

  A woman with a toddler walks past

  if you can call it

  walking:

  that motherbaby dance.

  Right and left he staggers

  leading

  distracted

  only going forward diagonally

  by chance.

  Soon I’ll pack my camera

  my notebook

  my ballpoint pen

  and come home to

  where

  she still combs her hair

  for you.

  You dig, you say, my fishnet tights

  my jaunty ass

  my cigarette

  but now I sit and wonder

  do wives wear fishnet tights—in Russia?

  I’ve cheated a bit here because I’ve worked on the poem before copying it out. I only had the first two sections and the ending was different. But I think it’s a lot better like this.

  It really is strange how poems work. On an Amsterdam boat train I remember Central Park and I start a poem. A month later, I add in something from today and—wow! It’s there.

  I think I have something good here. When we go back to London I’ll type it up and start a folder so I can show it to him. This journal stays locked. I don’t do poem number two now. I go to bed.

  Sunday, 12 March 1979

  Dearest Mummy,

  Thank you thank you thank you for your letter and for everything in it. Can I be independent and have—at the same time—a guardian angel? You’ll be glad to know—will you be glad to know?—that everything is moving pretty fast. I’ve actually started at Citadel Publishing, although we haven’t really agreed on a salary yet (Vivien tells me I should hold out for more than they’re offering) and I’ve used your money—as you said—to make a down payment on a little flat in Kensington. It’s terribly sweet—or will be when it’s ready. I’m supposed to move into it next month.Meanwhile—you’ll never guess—I’m borrowing Saif’s flat while he’s away. It feels really odd being in his atmosphere again like this. He’s in the States. I don’t really know what he’s doing there—except he’s taken Mandy (I told you about her visit up north) with him.He could be meeting her folks or he could be getting rid of her. I don’t know—he gave me a portfolio of her oeuvre a while back—

  Asya pauses and looks up from her typewriter. Maybe that’s not fair. After all, Mandy was—presumably—doing her best. And she probably didn’t ask Saif to give it to her. Maybe she was horrified at the idea. No, if she’d been horrified, it wouldn’t have happened. Saif would hardly have pressed her. Asya can just see them: Mandy going on about it—about the possibility of getting it published, Saif finally saying, “I can give it to Asya if you like; she’s in publishing.”

  “But what am I supposed to do with this?” Asya had asked.

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” Saif said.

  “I mean, I’m not—well, you know Citadel isn’t that kind of publisher. They do schoolbooks.”

  “Send her a nice rejection slip,” he said. “That’d be something.”

  Asya picks up Mandy’s portfolio—again. Had he particularly wanted her to see this? Wa s there a message in here somewhere?

  A set of photographs of buildings with mirrored windows, and on the facing page:

  We see what

  we want

  to see.

  You

  see

  your own

  reflection.

  A set of photographs of trees—autumnal—and a blurred figure, Saif surely, vanishing into the distance, and on the facing page:

  Next year

  once again they

  will flower.

  You

  will not

  return.

  Asya sits back in her chair. Is this meant for her? But it was Mandy who wrote it, not Saif. Does this mean that whatever had been written she still would have turned it into a personal message? She gazes out the dark window. Last month she had stood out there, under that tree she can now make out as only a dark shadow on the other side of the road, and she had watched him. She had watched him and known that she could not go back, sit companionably in the other armchair, and reach for a magazine. She leans sideways trying to see the sky, to see if there are any stars. Imagine the world out there, full of signals. You pick one up and it seems to speak to you. To you alone. Is this how horoscopes work? If she were to ask him … Asya has to smile; it’s exactly the type of question he hates. And yet he sends her this—this portfolio.

  She turns back to the table. Gerald would like it. Gerald would love it. It’s just his kind of thing. Multimedia too. She flicks through the pages and comes again to the longest of the poems and stops, as before, at the last verse. “So,” she says out loud, “she can say ass. Well, big deal. Anyone can say ass. I can say it. Ass. Jaunty ass. Big deal.” She turns back to her typewriter.

  —and they’re vaguely okay, I suppose. Not my kind of thing. Anyway, Mummy darling, you’re going to have to come over next summer—

  Satan

  I don’t understand anything. Are you both joking or what? Do you think I’ve gone senile that I can’t get a straight answer from either of you? So my son is crazy; he’s got an armored head. I know that, but I know also that he treasures you like the light of his eyes and he could never do without you. Yes, I know there’s a woman: some low creature has pulled him for two or three weeks; absence does terrible things, child, and it was you who chose to put countries between you. I’m not making excuses for him. Don’t ever think that. I am furious with him. I’ve told him and I’ve sworn: after this time I’ll not enter a home of his until things are all right between you. I’ll not enter any home of his unless you are its mistress.”

  “Tante,” Asya says when she can edge a word in. “Tante, It’s not like that. What’s happened between Saif and me is nothing at all to do with Clara.”

  “Clara! And you can put her name on your tongue? Your nerves, my dear, your nerves!” Adila Hanim’s voice pitches a couple of notes higher. “I tell you, I didn’t even believe him when he told me you knew.” She reaches for a casserole dish on a high shelf, and before her daughter-in-law can move to help her, she has banged it down on the cooker. “She actually has the boldness to come here with him. What does she think? She imagines I’m going to welcome her? That we’re all going
to sit down together and talk about this and that? I wouldn’t even shake her hand!”

  Asya stands in the doorway of the kitchen, her arms folded behind her. “Well, you must have annoyed him then,” she says gently.

  “Let him be annoyed. It’s time someone annoyed him. Staying with her in a hotel, openly, when he knows I’m coming.”

  Beyond her mother-in-law’s solid figure, a tall narrow window stands ajar. Visible beyond it are daylight and a brick wall. But Asya knows that it opens onto the narrow passage between the two Victorian houses. To the right is the fence enclosing the gardens; to the left is the street.

  “But, Tante, she was living with him here. He went to a hotel because he left the flat for you. It was natural that he should take her with him.”

  “Asya! Are you trying to give me a stroke?” Adila Hanim pauses with her hands on the rim of the pot into which she has just thrown a knob of butter. She stares reproachfully at her daughter-in-law. Why is Asya defending him? Like this, she, Adila, finds herself attacking Saif more and more; as though the matter gnawed at his mother’s heart more than at his wife’s. She looks at Asya, who tries to manage a small smile. Asya has changed. In the five years since they last met, she has changed. When she first came in and they hugged each other, then drew away with moist eyes, Adila had thought her daughter-in-law was still the same. But now she sees the changes. The black hair keeping more of its wave than it had ever been allowed in Cairo; the skin paler; the face newly defined, as though it had been sculpted out of its old childish roundness. But above all, the detachment, the holding back, to be seen in the eyes and in every stance of that slim body. Oh, child, child, whatever has happened to you? Adila Hanim turns away. “He could have stayed with me,” she says.

  “With you, Tante, yes. But with you and Hussein and Mira and her mother? There’s only one bedroom here. I can’t think how you’re managing.”

  “Look, my dear”—Adila Hanim sighs as she starts chopping an onion into a bowl—“I didn’t want them to come. I’ve been hearing for a while that there are problems between you two, so I thought I’d come over to try and mend things. Then Hussein, God preserve him, says ‘Mama, I won’t let you go alone; I’m coming with you.’ The next thing I know his wife is coming too, because she might as well shop for the baby, and then Souma Hanim decides to come and help her daughter with the shopping. So here we are. And the place is tight; I mean, the rooms are nice and big, but there’s only two of them, so we’re all in each other’s throats all the time. I know it’s only for a few days, but I’m not used to this, child, I’m not used to this.” She shakes her head sadly and bangs her knife against the edge of the bowl to shake off the last of the diced onion.

  Asya presses back against the wall. She has not seen Tante Adila for five years, and although the brown hair still bravely holds its color, the face is more troubled and lined than she remembers. She must feel her daughter-in-law’s newfound hardness. She must be hurt by it. But Asya isn’t hard, not really. She longs to go over and put her arms around those solid shoulders and … and then what? Then they’d sit down and cry together. And in the end Asya still would not be able to give her mother-in-law the thing she wants most, the thing she’s come all the way to London for. She watches as Adila Hanim turns on the tap.

  On a corner of the ornately tiled floor, a small black kitten is chasing his tail. He is obviously having a lot of fun. Autotelic fun, thinks Asya; all he needs is his own tail—which is fortunate, since his own tail is all he’s got. She’s seen him before: he’d been around when she came here eleven days ago to give Saif some of the mail that kept arriving for him at her address. For a few minutes of her visit the kitten had been a small black ball of fur on her husband’s immaculate white shoulder. Clara, he told her, his latest friend, had found this kitten and adopted him. She had named him Satan and spent hours looking after him. He’d also said that Clara would have loved to meet her but had gone out. She was Scots, he said, and spoke with och and wee. Her photo on the desk showed a dreamy, creamy oval face and a tumbling mass of auburn hair.

  “What was I saying? Yes, I did not speak to her at all,” Adila Hanim repeats. “I had to offer her tea, of course, because after all, this counts as my home while I’m here and she was in it. But apart from that I pretended not to even see her.”

  “It’s not her fault, Tante,” Asya begins weakly.

  “Why are you defending her?” Adila Hanim shakes the water from her hands, wipes them on the front of her apron, and puts them on her waist as she turns around to face her daughter-in-law. Asya looks down at her shoes, a plain deep green, away from the sadness and puzzlement on the careworn face.

  “Explain it to me,” Adila Hanim says. “I tell you, I just don’t understand anymore.”

  “Well, what I mean is”—Asya shifts against the wall—“she isn’t the first. There were others before her, and there are going to be others after her. She’s just not terribly important—and anyhow, we had already left each other.”

  “Left each other! Spit from your mouth, child. It’s just a little quarrel and it will pass. He’ll get rid of the redheaded tart.”

  “She’s not a tart.” Asya realizes how odd she must sound. Either mad or phony. “What I mean is,” she goes on, “it’s sort of normal here. I mean, she met him and he was a single man—separated. I think she’s in love with him. She probably thinks he’s going to marry her.”

  “Marry her! He’ll have to kill me first. Marry a daughter of a … a woman who’d take a respectable man off his wife? Living abroad has addled your brains, child. That’s what’s happened.”

  Adila Hanim peels potatoes in silence. The kitten flicks its tail, pounces at it, and loses it. Asya watches. She had offered to help but had been waved away. Should she insist? Should she be here at all? She knows the conversation isn’t going the way Tante Adila wants it to, but then it never could have. Can she stand here and say she’d been unhappy for years? Say she’s “known” another man but has left him? Say she loves Saif but has to be free?

  When he’d phoned her to say that his mother was in London and wanted to see her, they had both known that Adila Hanim was here to try and put an end to the separation between them.

  “If you don’t want to go, that’s fine. I’ll tell her,” Saif offered.

  “No, I’ll go. I ought to, and I’d like to see Tante.”

  “I’m not going,” he said. “She’ll have dinner laid out and it’ll be hellish.”

  So here she is. She had known she’d have to stall on any intimate conversation. Yet she really loves Tante Adila and has missed her—misses her even more now that she’s here. Maybe she had hoped somehow to make her feel not too bad about the whole thing. Well, this was a far cry from the days shared in the Madis’ kitchen at home. The French windows open onto the garden where the three cats snoozed under the pear tree. Dada Nour preparing the vegetables, her daughter at the sink washing chopping boards, mixing bowls, graters as they were finished with. Tante and her at the table. Tante cooking, showing her how to rub the boiled pasta with raw egg before covering it with the sauce bolognese, how to recognize the exact moment when the pepper sizzling in the butter was ready for the rice. Tante hadn’t thought she was a tart for visiting her son, for spending days in their home without her own parents knowing, for vanishing into his room for the afternoon.

  “If you love my son,” she once said to her, “you are loved by me.” What would she say now if she knew the truth? Should she tell her the truth? She looks at her mother-in-law’s grieving, betrayed face. What is the truth but every detail of the last nine years? How can it be told? And would it really make this easier? And anyway, shouldn’t it be up to him? This is his family. Let them believe what he chooses for them to believe. Maybe he prefers the cad’s role to that of the injured husband. She looks down at the kitten, busy now with a stray pistachio nut. Poor Clara. Bad luck to be the one around when this family disciplinary expedition showed up.

  A littl
e while ago it would have been Mandy. And before that, Lady Caroline. But it was just this gentle, tragic-faced girl’s luck. Clara’s medieval features made Asya think of the Lady of Shallott. True, she had only seen her photo—but she felt as if she knew her. She knows, for instance, that Clara is dreaming of a home in the shadow of the pyramids, of “bonny wee bairns” with brown skin and green eyes. She also knows for a certainty that within two months she’ll be back in St. Andrews—possibly with a black cat.

  Adila Hanim turns and catches Asya staring at the kitten. “Imagine. She’s got a special comb for that cat. A special comb!” She snorts, then shakes her head and goes back to chopping the potatoes into the almost-ready chicken casserole.

  When Asya arrived, Adila Hanim had been sharing the kitchen with her second son’s mother-in-law, Souma Hanim. Each woman was determined that she would be the one to do all the cooking, the cleaning, and the washing-up. Adila Hanim—whose mother had died when she was five, leaving her a father and an older brother to look after—because she had never been and never could be in a house run by another woman. Souma Hanim, because she was well bred to an extreme and would never allow it to be said of her that she had sat around and let her daughter’s mother-in-law slave over the sink and the stove. So the two women, trying to work in this cupboard calling itself a kitchen—a fraction of the size of the rooms they were accustomed to—had been bumping into each other, reaching across each other, easing past each other, urging each other to go for a walk with your son/daughter on this beautiful June day; to go and rest in the living room and I’ll make some tea because there’s only one apron, one carving knife, one grater, and anyway, everything’s almost ready.