When we separate, her eyes are moist. “You’ll be fine, Tami. I’ll see you soon.”
I won’t be fine. If I fail the interview, I lose my Rose.
If I fail the interview, I lose everything.
“I’ll see you soon,” I tell her, wishing so much it were true.
The office where we’re to be interviewed is near the airport, and the drive takes a few minutes longer than we anticipated because of a bad car wreck on Kino Parkway. The VW bug didn’t stand a chance against the semitrailer truck. Still, we arrive fifteen minutes early. We go through the security screening inside the entrance, and Ike takes my hand as we walk to the waiting-room lobby. He’s got an extra spring in his step. In his mind, this all turns out well—there is no other possible outcome. He mentions a ski trip he’d like us to take in February, at a resort in Utah. I tell him yes, I’d love to go. I let him keep up the pretense because this is one of his qualities that I love most: his American optimism.
The waiting room is large and empty, and we sit on an ugly wooden bench, and I’m certain we’re being watched, that there are cameras or one-way mirrors with powerful unseen eyes behind them, judging us from a distance. Everything we say feels false.
Did you pay that invoice for the electrician? ... Yes, I did.... Remind me we need to pick up milk on the way home.... Pick up milk on the way home ... very funny, buster....
What has always been natural between us now feels forced. It’s as if we’re playacting at being married.
Tiny bits of nervous sweat break out along my hairline and I press my fingertips into it, trying to make it look like I’m smoothing back my hair. On my lap is a binder I’ve put together of all the documents we might need, such as our marriage certificate, bank statements, credit card statements, the lease to the guesthouse, the leasing contract for Common Grounds. Everything has both our names on it. I also have pictures of us together, a scrapbook of sorts—of our Elvis-impersonator wedding in Las Vegas, of us lying on the beach in San Diego, of us painting the coffee shop (we stuck with Ike’s color choice). There’s one of me on the back of Ike’s scooter. There’s another of us on our bicycles. There’s one of us having a Persian dinner at Maryam’s, and another at one of Ike’s Texas Hold ’Em nights, and several from the party we threw when we were naming the coffee shop and both our families (except for Ike’s mother) were there. I flip through the binder, trying to see the photographs through the eyes of the interviewer, and no matter how hard I try, I see nothing suspicious, nothing other than two people in love with life and with each other.
Ten o’clock comes and goes. Ike hates to be late, hates to be kept waiting—it makes him snippy—and yet we are. He tries to sit perfectly still, but his left leg shakes, imperceptibly to the eye but not to me, as my leg is pressed against his. I put my hand on his thigh to steady him.
“Are you nervous?” I whisper.
“About what?” he asks with a smile, slipping his hand into mine. His is warm and safe and it’s the hand I want to hold for the rest of my life.
After a thirty-minute wait, a pale-faced Hispanic man with an unfortunate haircut appears in the doorway of the waiting room. “Soroush?”
Quickly, we rise. “That’s us,” Ike says. “We’re Soroush.”
The man nods a greeting. “I’m Cesar Hernandez.”
He doesn’t look mean. I couldn’t say he looks nice, necessarily, but he doesn’t look mean, either. A layer or two away from sloppy, he wears navy pants that have been through the wash too many times, tattered loafers, and a less-than-white oxford shirt, open-necked, no tie. He offers no hand for a handshake. I wonder if he was born here or south of the border, and whether that matters in how he’ll make his decision.
We follow him down the hallway to his office, where he gives us the meaningless smile of a bureaucrat and offers us each a chair. He sits behind his desk, while we’re on the other side, across from him. He flips open a file folder and scans its contents. My body is so tense I feel as if all my muscles have locked up, and I’m afraid to even look at Ike. We’ve waited so long for this day, and now it’s here, and is it really happening?
This is it. This is everything.
This man—this Mr. Hernandez with the bad haircut—will decide the fate of my marriage, the fate of my life. He has such power over us. Who is he? Does he have a wife? Does he think people are basically good or basically not so good?
He looks up and catches my eye. “Nervous?”
“A little bit,” I say, giving him my best Julia Roberts smile.
“That’s natural.” He almost seems to fall for my smile but then catches himself and shifts his attention to Ike.
“So,” he says. “Tell me how you and Tamila met.”
For this question, Ike is well prepared. No matter how many times he tells the story of how we met, he never loses his emotional undertone, and he doesn’t lose it now, either. He tells Mr. Hernandez how he saw me for the first time that day at Starbucks, when I was hot and thirsty and limping from my new boots as I walked to English class.
She was a vision of beauty
, he tells Mr. Hernandez,
a disheveled vision of beauty.
I can’t help but laugh. Only to him. I was so nervous, on my own in America for the first time, and Ike was the first American man I spoke to. It was a conversation filled with confusion—he gave me a sample of tea and I didn’t understand it was free. There’s always a price, right? I kept trying to pay, but Ike kept telling me no. He retells the story sweetly—Mr. Hernandez smiles as he listens!—and then Ike’s voice slows and deepens as he explains how he noticed my terror of the policemen who approached me, and how he made sure I was okay afterward, and how he offered to help me practice my English after he got off work.
And that
, Ike says,
was the start of a beautiful friendship.
Mr. Hernandez idly confirms some of the details from our application—that my sister has been in the U.S. for a long time, that I lived here when I was a small child, that my sister’s a citizen.
He looks up at me again. “And you like it here?”
“Very much, yes. I’m very happy here.”
“And you’d like to stay.” He says this as a statement, not a question.
“Oh, yes,” I say. “Yes, please.”
He smiles. “What was your intention when you first came on your tourist visa?”
This is the tricky part. I’m careful to keep my eyes on him, careful not to look at Ike. “I came to visit my sister. It had been a very long time since I’d seen her.”
“So your intention was strictly for a visit?”
The top of my scalp feels prickly. I’d like to scratch it, but is a scratch more than just a scratch at a time like this? “Yes,” I say, intertwining my fingers to help me resist the urge to scratch. “I came here only for a visit.”
“You intended to go back when your visa expired?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And yet here you are.” His tone now is not as friendly.
Ike reaches for my hand. “I wouldn’t let her go.”
“What did she offer you?”
“I beg your pardon?” Ike says.
“Nothing,” I say.
“You offered love and devotion,” Ike corrects me. “That’s not nothing.”
But somehow, I don’t think this is what Mr. Hernandez means.
“Tell me how your marriage came about,” he says to me.
“Sure,” I say. We’ve practiced this, too. “I’d gone to Lake Havasu and then Las Vegas with my friends from my English class, and it was very much fun, and we were in the hotel room before we went out for the night, and there was a knock on the door, and it was Ike. He’d gone to my sister’s house to see me—to propose—and when I wasn’t there, he drove straight to the airport and flew to Las Vegas to find me.”
“Sounds romantic,” Mr. Hernandez says.
“It was,” I say.
What
really
happened is that my engagement to the horrible Masoud ended the day of what was to be our wedding. Ardishir went back to Haroun to see if he was still willing to marry me, but he said no. We bought my ticket back to Iran, and I left on the trip to Lake Havasu and then Las Vegas with my friends, a farewell trip. While I was gone, Maryam went to Ike and explained my visa situation. Ike then flew to Las Vegas and proposed much as I already described. But I change some of those details, and some, I omit. The way I tell it, I make it sound like a scene from a movie—which, really, is what it felt like and how I choose to remember it.
For a long, awkward moment after I tell this story, Mr. Hernandez says nothing. And then he asks Ike, “Is this all true?”
Ike nods. “All of Tami’s friends were there, so we have witnesses if you need them.”
“Why the rush to get married?” Mr. Hernandez asks. “You hadn’t known her very long.”
“That’s easy,” Ike says. “Because I was—and still am—completely, madly in love with her. I had a limited window of opportunity, right? If she went back to Iran, I’d lose her forever. That wasn’t an acceptable outcome. It was either marry her or live without her. Like I said, it was an easy choice.”
“What did your parents think when you got married so suddenly?” Mr. Hernandez asks.
Mrs. Hanson. What did she do?
Sweat breaks out on my hairline again.
Mustn’t wipe it.
I keep a doll’s smile on my face, like this is not at all a disturbing direction we’re heading.
Mrs. Hanson loves me! Everything’s fine!
This is what my doll’s smile says.
Unfortunately, it’s not what Ike says.
“I can’t say they were thrilled,” he says. “But everyone who knows Tami comes to love her. They just wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing. I told them I’d never been more sure of anything in my life.”
Mr. Hernandez accepts Ike’s answer with a nod. “And when you proposed, I assume you were under the impression that Ms. Soroush loved you as well? That she loved you as you loved her?”
“What does
that
mean?” Ike says. “Of course she did.”
“Did she offer you money in exchange for marrying her? Such as ... oh, I don’t know ... money for the business you hoped to establish?”
Mrs. Hanson told him this!
Ike sits straight, then leans forward and rests his hand on Mr. Hernandez’s desk, tapping it with his index finger. “She offered to love, honor, and cherish me.” His voice is steely. “It was an offer I’d be an idiot to refuse.”
But Mr. Hernandez gives him a look that suggests maybe it’s the opposite—that Ike would have been smart to refuse my affections. He waits an endless minute before asking in a matter-of-fact, gotcha voice, “Do you think Ms. Soroush loved you more than she loved her other fiancés?”
Other fiancés.
“Excuse me?” Ike sounds very far away from me.
Other fiancés. Other fiancés.
Mr. Hernandez repeats his question. “Do you think Ms. Soroush loved you more than she loved her other fiancés?”
Only one. I only had the one, and how does he know this?
Maybe he’s testing us. Maryam warned that they might go fishing for information. She said be careful. She said stick to the story.
“I did not have fiancés,” I say.
“It’s okay, Tami,” Ike says. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“So you knew about them?” Mr. Hernandez asks.
This could be a trick!
I shout a warning to Ike in my mind, but he doesn’t hear.
“I knew about them, yes.”
“You knew at the time you married her?”
Ike lowers his chin and considers the question. He keeps his hand on the desk and with his shoulders so strong, but bent like this, he looks like a wounded warrior, but only for a moment. Soon, he looks up and makes confident eye contact with Mr. Hernandez. “Yes. I did.”
“It didn’t bother you? She had more fiancés in the span of three months than most people have in a lifetime. She’s either extremely fickle, or ...” Mr. Hernandez raises an eyebrow. To me, he says, “You left out quite a large part of the story.”
“Excuse me, please,” I say. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“
Of course
it bothered me,” Ike says. “But you’ve got to know Tami. You’ve got to know the situation. There was more going on than meets the eye. There were a lot of cultural factors at play that wouldn’t, at first glance, make sense to an outsider.”
“I deal with cultural issues all day, every day,” Mr. Hernandez says. “I’m well aware of differing cultural mores regarding marriage.”
“Well, then you understand,” Ike says. “That’s what this was. Her family’s very traditional. They were trying to arrange a marriage for her, and she wanted no part of it. That’s it. End of story.”
“Oh.” Mr. Hernandez chuckles. “There’s quite a bit more to the story.”
“There’s not,” I say. “I promise there’s not.”
“Are you aware of the consequences for providing false information in this interview?” he says.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ike says. “We’re telling you the truth.”
Mr. Hernandez raises an eyebrow and asks me, “So your family wanted you to get married? They wanted you to get married and to stay in America, is that right?”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s right. But I ... I didn’t ...”
“You can’t hold someone responsible for the behavior of their family members,” Ike says.
“I was going back to Iran,” I say. “I promise I was. I have my ticket right here; would you like to see it?” I make a move to find it in the binder, this beautiful binder that contains the proof of our marriage, the proof of our love, but Mr. Hernandez waves for me to stop. He has no interest in it.
“I’d rather see your ticket to Chicago,” he says. “Did you bring
that
with you?”
I gasp.
He wasn’t just fishing for information. He already knows!
“Chicago? ”
“Yes, Chicago. The ticket I’m referring to is the one your fiancé, Masoud Farkhi, purchased for you. Remember him? You were supposed to go to Chicago with him after your wedding, the one that was to take place just days before your visa expired?”