Behold the Dreamers (19 page)

“You have to do what Winston says,” Neni said, her arms still folded over her high belly. “The only way you can escape this is to shut her up, because if you tell her something Mr. Edwards doesn't want her to know, Mr. Edwards will fire you for breaking the contract. If she ever finds out you knew something and didn't tell her, she'll fire you for lying to her. She won't care if you have a family or if—”

“Neni, please! Let me rest, I'm begging you. My head is aching, okay?”

“My head is aching too, okay? I don't like this situation at all. I know Mrs. Edwards. I know what kind of woman she is. She looks like she is weak, but she gets what she wants from people, one way or another. You cannot make any mistake with your job right now, let me tell you. One little mistake, you lose your job at a time when—”

“You think I don't know that!”

“Everyone calm down,” Winston said. “And Bo, please, don't talk to our woman like that. Not especially when she's carrying our fine American baby.”

“Maybe a woman carrying a baby should know when to stop talking.”

Neni looked at Jende from head to toe, her momentary disdain unconcealed. She sat up and started lifting herself off the sofa. Winston stood up and pulled her to her feet.

“Put some sense into that coconut head of his,” she said to Winston. “Because if I say one more thing to him, I swear to you, my mouth will start bleeding like a slaughtered cow's.”

Jende and Winston chuckled as Neni bade Winston good night and waddled into the bedroom.

“How did I get myself involved in other people's married business like this?” Jende asked Winston after Neni had closed the bedroom door. “This one is beyond me.”

“Women can be very tricky,” Winston said. “If you don't give her what she wants, she'll go to him and make up a story about you so that he'll do away with you.”

“Then I'll become like Joseph in Egypt.”

“Yes, you'll be like Joseph in Egypt. But instead of solving a dream about seven years of plenty and seven years of famine, you'll be living in seven years of hardship.”

O
N
THE
MORNING
OF
HIS
THIRTY-EIGHTH
BIRTHDAY,
HE
STOOD
OUTSIDE
the car and held the back door open for Clark Edwards, as he did every workday morning. He was dressed in a suit Neni had bought for him at Target as his birthday gift, a gray wool ensemble that he paired with a white shirt and red clip-on tie and completed with a pair of brown dress shoes. Earlier that morning, as he'd stood in front of the mirror admiring himself, Neni had walked into the bedroom and told him he looked more handsome than ever, and he had agreed, giving her a long thank-you kiss.

“Today is my birthday, sir,” he told Clark.

“Happy birthday, then,” Clark replied without taking his eyes off his laptop, which was booting up. “I won't ask how old you are.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jende replied, smiling. While they waited for the light to turn green at Park and Seventieth, he pondered how best to bring up the topic.

“I know this is a very busy time for you, sir,” he said, “but there is something I wanted to discuss with you.”

“Go on,” Clark said, still not lifting his eyes from the laptop.

“It is about Mrs. Edwards, sir.”

Clark continued looking at his laptop. “What about her?”

“Sir, I think she wants to know where you go to. And who you see. And all those kinds of things, sir. She wants me to tell her about what I see you doing.”

Clark looked at Jende in the rearview mirror. “Really?”

Jende nodded. “I do not know what to do, sir. That is why I am asking you.”

He wanted to turn around to see the reaction on Clark's face—rage? disappointment? frustration?—but he couldn't; he could only catch a glimpse of the boss's eyes in the mirror.

“Tell her what she wants to know,” Clark said.

“I can tell her, sir? Do you want me, sir … you want me to—”

“You can answer her questions.”

“You mean I can tell her everything, sir?”

“Of course you can tell her everything. Where do you take me to that you can't talk about? Who do you see me with?”

“That is what I told her, sir. I told her I only take you to office buildings in midtown and downtown and sometimes—”

“Never mention Chelsea.”

“I have never mentioned Chelsea, sir. I will never.”

The car was silent for a minute, the men acknowledging without words what they each knew the other knew. Jende wanted Clark to know more; he wanted to assure him of his loyalty, promise him again that his secret would always be safe. He wanted to tell Mr. Edwards that because he had given him a good job that had changed his life and that was enabling him to take care of his family, send his wife to school, send his father-in-law a cash gift every few months, replace the roof and crumbling wooden walls of his parents' house, and save for the future, he would always protect him every way he could.

He did not say it, but Clark Edwards said “Thank you” nonetheless.

The perspiration running down Jende's back dried off. “Thank you so much, sir, for understanding,” he said. “I was not sleeping well. Not knowing what to do. I am glad I can make both you and Mrs. Edwards happy.”

“Of course.”

“I was so afraid I would lose my job if I did not do the right thing.”

“There's nothing to be afraid of. Your job is secure. You've been excellent. Continue doing as I ask you to do, and you won't have to worry about anything.”

Both men were silent again as the car crawled through the midtown madness of tourist shoppers and harried commuters and street vendors and city buses and tour buses and yellow cabs and black cars and children in strollers and messengers on bikes, and too much of everything.

“Sir,” Jende asked, “is Mrs. Edwards doing well?”

“Yeah, she's fine. Why?”

“It looked to me, sir, as if—”

Clark's phone buzzed and he picked it up. “Did you talk to Cindy?” he said to the person on the line. “Great … I think she's putting you guys at the Mandarin Oriental, not sure why … No, it's fine, if that's what everyone prefers.” He listened for a while and then laughed. “Sounds like Mom,” he said. “And Dad's visit to New York is never complete without a Central Park walk … Yeah, I'll make sure Jende is available to pick everyone up from the airport … Me too, I'm excited; it's going to be great … I can't remember the last time, either. Maybe the year Mighty and Keila were born and no one was in the mood to deal with the holiday crowd with babies?… Don't worry about bringing anything, and tell Mom not to. Cindy and June are taking care of everything. They've got their menu down … I don't think they need help; they've been doing it for years … Oh, okay … Go ahead then. I didn't know you'd already suggested it to her. I'm glad everyone's on the same page … Listen, Cec, I've got to go … Sounds good.

“Sorry about that,” Clark said to Jende after hanging up. “We're very excited about being together in New York for the first time in so many years.”

“I understand the excitement, sir.”

“You were saying something about Cindy?”

“Yes, sir,” Jende replied. “I was just saying, sir, I don't know if it is the right thing for me to say, but it looked to me like she has lost some weight, so I just wanted to make sure that she is fine. I will be glad to do whatever is needed if she is not well and … if you need me to help around the house, sir.”

“That won't be necessary, but thank you. She's doing very well.”

“I am glad to hear that, sir, because I was a bit worried—”

“The recession is hard on us all, but she's doing good.”

“By the grace of God, sir, we will all be okay soon.”

Clark picked up the
Wall Street Journal
lying next to him. After a few minutes of reading it, he lifted up his head and looked at Jende. “You should tell her that she lost weight,” he said. “She'll be glad to hear that.”

Jende smiled. “Maybe I will, sir,” he replied. “Mrs. Edwards is a good woman.”

“Yeah,” Clark said, returning to his newspaper. “She's a good woman.”

T
WICE
A
DAY,
DURING
HIS
LUNCH
BREAK
AND
BEFORE
PARKING
THE
CAR
FOR
the day, he wrote down everything he thought Cindy would love to read: benign information, banal rundowns. He provided details that were far from necessary; included times, locations, and names that served no purpose; added descriptions of people whose actions and behaviors contributed nothing to the narrative. This was his first chance to write something on a daily basis since his student days at National Comprehensive, so he took the opportunity to employ phrases and expressions he hadn't found a way to use in everyday conversation; throw in words he'd learned from reading the dictionary he'd owned since secondary school; display sentences and tenses he'd picked up from the newspaper and which he hoped would be proof to the madam that he was thinking carefully as he wrote.

On a Tuesday afternoon, he wrote:

On a Friday evening, after driving Clark from the Chelsea Hotel to the office, he wrote:

As often as he could, he put the gym in place of the Chelsea Hotel, but in the weeks when Clark went to the hotel more than twice, he concocted other reasons, something novel every week. One evening, fearing that Cindy might have tried to reach Clark while he was in the hotel, he wrote about being stuck in bad traffic in the Holland Tunnel, which has “staggeringly deficient phone reception.” Another time he wrote that Clark had to hurry to a meeting, “so he jumped quickly into a yellow taxi when I was on my way back from picking up Mighty so I have no way that is indisputably solid to know where he was going to or who he was seeing. But I am unequivocal in my believe that he was going to a very crucial meeting.”

He carried the blue notebook with him at all working hours, and presented it to Cindy every morning so she could read it on her way to work. Sometimes she appeared to read every detail, nodding and referencing previous pages. Always, she gave it back to him with no comment besides a quick thanks and a reminder to keep writing.

“I will continue writing, madam,” he always said as he held the door open for her to step out of the car. “Have a great day, madam.”

And her days did seem to be getting great, right from around when he began submitting the entries to her.

Phone calls with her friends were no longer peppered with teary whispers about “what he's doing to me” and doubts about “how much longer I can go on like this.” She was laughing a little more, and by the time Jende gave her three weeks' worth of entries, she was laughing a lot more, and louder. Her looks did not return to where they'd been the year before (her skin, though still supple-looking, had lost some of its glow, and her collarbones were sticking out even higher), and she did not stop talking about Vince, worrying that he hadn't responded to her email in three days, but she found reasons to smile, like the fact that June and Mike had reconciled, and she and Mighty and Clark were going to St. Barths for Christmas. It should be a wonderful time, she told her friends, and Jende fervently wished so too, because after months of hearing her groan and sigh, and watching her rest her head against the window with her hand on her cheek and her eyes on the blissful world outside, shake her head, and dejectedly say, whatever, Clark, do whatever you want; after seeing too much of the anguish she bottled up so well when she wasn't around her family and closest friends, he very badly wanted the madam to have a wonderful time.

Which was what she seemed to have had on the day she and Clark attended a gala at the Waldorf Astoria the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Clark's parents had come for the holiday, along with his sister and nieces, and days later, Mighty had told Jende what an awesome Thanksgiving his family had had. They had celebrated it with June's family, as they always did (the two families alternated hosting duties every year), and his mother and grandmother and aunt had cooked and baked all day, laughing and telling stories in the kitchen. It was the first Thanksgiving his dad's family had spent together in forever, because with his grandparents in California and his aunt and cousins in Seattle, it had been hard to get everyone together, considering work schedules and his dad and aunt's shared hatred of holiday travel. But this year everyone said they had to do it, and it had been so much fun. Jende was surprised to learn that Cindy and her mother-in-law loved each other, because in Limbe mothers-in-law were often the reason wives stayed up at night crying, but Mighty had told him that no, his mom called his grandparents “Mom and Dad” and always made sure to phone them at least once a month as well as on their birthdays and wedding anniversary. She always insisted Mighty and Vince do the same, and whenever they forgot, she scolded them and reminded them that family was everything.

Indeed, Jende could see in Cindy's new joy, days after Thanksgiving, that the security of family was her greatest source of happiness. Thanks to this rediscovered joy, hers was no longer a marriage limping from day to day but one skipping and kicking up its heels and waltzing from evening to evening to Johann Strauss's “Voices of Spring.”

On the day of the Waldorf Astoria gala, she and Clark entered the car beaming, the happiest Jende had ever seen them, alone or together, in over a year of working for them. Maybe the notebook entries had blown her fears away, Jende thought, assured her that her husband was a good man. Or perhaps the family reunion had reminded her of everything worth fighting for. Or perhaps it was due to something else that had happened between her and her husband, something Jende had no way of knowing. Whatever it was, it was more than sufficient to turn them into young lovers, whispering and giggling on the ride to the gala: she, lustrous in a red strapless trumpet gown; he, youthful and suave in a perfect-fitting tuxedo. They reentered the car five hours later in even greater merriment, laughing about things that had transpired on the dance floor.

“I never thought the day would come when I would see Mr. and Mrs. Edwards happy like that,” Jende said to Neni when he got home after midnight.

“Were they kissing and doing all kinds of things in the backseat?” Neni asked as she placed his dinner on the table.

“No, God forbid. I would have had an accident in one minute if I'd seen that. They were only leaning against each other and speaking into each other's ears and she was laughing very loud at everything he was saying. He was playing with her hair … Anyway, I didn't want to look too much, but the whole thing was really shocking me.”

“I wonder what happened. You think maybe she put a few drops of love potion in his food? The really strong one that makes a man fall for you and treat you like a queen?”

“Ah, Neni!” Jende said, laughing. “American women do not use love potions.”

“That's what you think?” Neni said, laughing, too. “They use it, oh. They call it lingerie.”