Dreams of Bread and Fire (13 page)

Violet switched on the table lamp. When are we going to meet this Asa, your mystery man?

I don’t know, Ani said. Her voice caught in her throat. She and Asa had been arguing again.

Are you sleeping with him? her mother asked.

Yes.

Your father and I didn’t sleep together until we were married.

I thought you guys were sophisticated hipsters. Grandma acts like you were practically a harlot.

Violet sighed. Ani, your grandmother believed any woman who wore a dress that showed her knees was a harlot. I was a nice Armenian girl. My vices were an occasional cigarette and marriage to an
odar.

What about Harry? Ani asked.

That’s different, Ani. I’m a widow with a grown daughter. This mess I’ve been in with Harry was guaranteed to disrupt my life alone.

What about his wife?

Harry moved out long before he and I started seeing each other. And if you’d like to know, Harry and Hasmig have been meeting with their priest for the past few months. They’re talking about getting back together.

Oh, Mom, I’m sorry.

I could use a cigarette, Violet said, sniffing back tears.

You’ll be okay, Mom. You’ll find somebody better. Ani brushed her mother’s hair back from her forehead. She noticed for the first time a few white strands threading Violet’s black hair.

It wasn’t so easy, was it? You loved somebody whether they deserved it or not, probably more if they didn’t deserve it.

Ani glanced up to see Van approaching from across the room.

His face was clouded as he sat down, as though he were puzzling over some kind of a problem.

Ani commented, “You know, Van, you were never what anyone would call talkative, but now you’re downright taciturn.”

“Do you mind?” he asked.

“It leaves me lots of space for my thoughts, but sometimes I want to know what’s going on in there.”

“What are you doing next year?” he asked.

“I’m waiting to hear from graduate programs. What about you?”

Van shrugged. “At the moment, I’m satisfied with the work I’m doing.”

“Any long-term goals?” she asked.

“I’d like to sail a small boat to Aghtamar—you know, the island in the middle of Lake Van.”

“That’s in Turkey, isn’t it?”

“The Armenian homeland. I could see myself building a house on the shores of the lake. People from the Diaspora will come back to restore the community there.”

“You think people are going to pack their bags in Watertown and Fresno to head to Turkey—I mean Armenia?”

“Some will. The ones who still have an attachment to the homeland.”

“Even if you get a bunch of Armenians to go back, aren’t other people living there now? I mean, it’s been almost seventy years.”

“After the revolution, Armenians, Kurds, and progressive Turks will live side by side and rebuild the region.”

“After what revolution?” Ani asked.

“Ours. You want to join?” He asked this with a wry smile.

A sexy smile, thought Ani, with some kind of question in it. “I’ll take a rain check. I’m not sure I want to go back to Watertown, let alone the Armenian homeland.”

Ani was accustomed to riding the metro by herself at night and walking solo along dusky streets, but when Van insisted on escorting her home she felt grateful. They skirted the grand boulevards, making their way through narrow side streets. She glanced at his profile, which filled her with yearning.

These were the ways that Van was unlike Asa: his skin was olive, his eyebrows emphatic, his hands square with hair on the knuckles. His hometown was Ani’s hometown. They had both traveled far from there.

There was a wall around him, but maybe there was a door in the wall. Was that the way all men were, walls and doors? The problem with Asa was that inside the door was another wall with another door.

They made a half circle through the place des Victoires past a floodlit statue of the Sun King on a rearing stallion. Ani glanced in the windows of designer boutiques. She admired a dress in the Kenzo show window, then worried whether Van would suspect that she coveted the dress. He would not approve, she was sure.

Van put his hand at Ani’s elbow, shepherding her through the crossings. Again the sparks flowed from his fingertips up her arm. Here again the craving welled up inside her.

The man, according to Tacey Barton, should love the woman more. But Ani wasn’t about to start taking advice from Tacey.

Maybe it was like walking across a frozen pond. She was on one side; he was on the other. Let him take the first step. Then she would take a step. Until they met in the middle or plunged into the icy water.

The night was chill. She pulled the shawl closer around her neck.

“Are you cold?” Van asked.

“I’m okay,” she answered.

“Here, take my hat.” He pulled a black felt beret from his coat pocket.

Ani pulled the hat on and tucked her hair inside.

It was such a thoughtful, friendly gesture. Asa was never Ani’s friend. Van had been her friend for a long time.

Tell me who your friend is, and I will tell you who you are
.

Don’t spoil it, Ani told herself, by tumbling down the old stone well.

On Beaujolais they stood awkwardly near the building’s back door.

“Ani,” he ventured.

“Yeah?” Ani asked, looking at him quizzically.

There was something urgent in his tone. She studied the downcast lids with sable lashes and the planes of his shadowed face.

He stared at his upturned palms.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me. . . .” His voice was edged with flint.

Was he angry?

She joked. “Our great-grandfathers were first cousins. You come from Dexter Avenue. The only other thing I need to know is your phone number.”

He replied, “And that I can’t give you. I don’t have a phone.”

The tension of the moment dissipated. In her nervousness she had slammed a door on whatever it was he had wanted to tell her.

“So how can I get in touch with you?” she asked.

“I’ll call you. I’ve got to go now. Good night, Ani.” He backed away. “Thanks for the fun. I don’t get too much fun these days.”

“How about an address?” she called after him.

He laughed, turning toward the dark. “I’ll phone, I promise.”

Every time the orange telephone trilled in her room over the next week Ani hoped it was Van, but he didn’t call. One evening as she was preparing for Sofia Zed’s class she plucked the receiver on the first ring.

“Where’d you get this phone number?” she asked Asa, her blood spinning in her temples at the sound of his voice.

“Mrs. Barton gave it to me,” Asa said. “You busy?”

“I’m reading about tortured love.”

“You taking a psychology class?’

“Literature, Asa. Novels are full of it.”

“I found another one of your notes this morning.”

Before she had left his apartment in Seattle in August she had hidden slips of paper with lines from poems on them. Ani knew that if she didn’t tell him to stop he would recite the words.

He began, “‘
So much space between us two / We kiss the planets when we kiss
—’”

She interrupted. She knew where it was going and didn’t want to be dragged to the end of the poem. “Don’t, Asa. Don’t read it.”

“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” Asa asked.

“Did you have a nice Christmas with May?”

“I didn’t call to talk about that, Ani. I miss you.”

The muscles in Ani’s shoulders tensed. She didn’t say anything in response.

“I still love you, Ani,” Asa said.

Candlelight flickered in the mirror of an old dresser. She smelled apricot oil and tasted whisky and pot smoke on Asa’s breath. His body was the landscape she had wanted to travel. Oh, no, she thought, I’m backsliding. Then suddenly she jerked herself up. Don’t let him reel you in like a fish on a hook.

“Can’t talk to you, Asa. Please don’t call again.” Ani laid the receiver in its cradle.

the mouth is the heart’s interpreter

Sondage stubbed out his cigarette, indicating that the class was over. As an afterthought he growled, “All of you. Go see
Ordet.
At the crossroads of the Infinite and the Sublime, the Verb will bring you face-to-face with your soul.”

Michael, who was seated next to Ani, passed her a note:
Tomorrow?

While she liked Michael, she had no interest in coming face-to-face with her soul while elbow to elbow with him in a darkened theater.

Ani scribbled,
Can’t. Maybe the Musée Marmottan next week.
She slid the note back to him. Disappointment registered on his face.

She wished Elena were in Paris. Ani missed her women friends. They used to sit around in the student center café for hours talking about life and books and relationships. Ani now understood that
relationship
was a euphemism for
bad boyfriend.
Having Elena to complain to was one of the things that had made life with Asa bearable.

Ani was weary of boys. Jacques Stein had phoned her to apologize for his behavior at Odile’s party weeks after the event and to ask her out. She had turned him down. She couldn’t take any more strained conversations in French with men she barely knew. And she hadn’t heard from Van in three weeks.

On the street a man had his arm hooked around his girlfriend’s neck like a shepherd’s crook. The woman’s face was doleful and downtrodden. A man and a woman bickered in the aisle of the department store where Ani was buying lipstick. Asa hated lipstick, especially red, so she chose a color called Rouge Radical. A woman at the next counter was purchasing concealer for a blackened eye.

That evening Tacey and Le Con were having a loud argument in the master suite. Ani sat at the kitchen table with Sydney as the child ate her supper. The apartment’s solid walls and floors muffled the words, but Sydney’s face was drawn, the muscles in her jaw moving stiffly as she chewed, while the angry tones and the sound of slamming doors filtered down the stairs.

“Do you think they’re going to get a divorce?” Sydney asked.

“Oh, Syd, people can argue without getting a divorce.”

“I think my dad has a new secretary. That’s usually when they yell,” Sydney observed.

The next day Ani went to a late-afternoon matinee by herself. Shot in black-and-white in an austere landscape, the film was a drama about a gentleman farmer and his three grown sons. One of the sons, who had gone mad from reading too much Kierkegaard, believed he was the Son of God. A beatific daughter-in-law died during a gruesome childbirth scene. In the film’s closing moments, the lost son returned and, in a Christlike gesture, commanded the woman to rise from the dead. Her eyes fluttered open.

Tears slipping down her face, Ani wanted to shout at the screen, It’s not fair! You can’t bring her back to life. The dead stay dead. And the dead are good for nothing.

The lights went up. The moviegoers spilled onto the bustling street, where Ani became a faceless exile. She had wanted to free herself from old attachments—her family, the old house, the forsythia in the garden, and the familiar streets—but now she was a pale shadow sliding through the apparent world. The connections she had wrought in her new life had proved to be frail. She saw herself dangling like a spider dropped from the ceiling on a fine filament. It reminded her of seeing Asa rappel down a cliff face on his rope—it was a sturdy rope, after all, but from afar it appeared as barely a scarlet thread.

She stared down at her small reflection in the night-lit water gliding under the bridge. No matter how they looped around, her thoughts always seemed to come back to Asa. What would become of her now that he was no longer the center of her world?

What will become of us, Ani? What will we do
?

That’s what Violet Silver had said after the news of her husband’s death was relayed over the telephone. Ani was four at the time and she was scared to see her mother crying, the tears spilling out of Violet as though she were cracking apart like a leaky dam. Ani had started to cry as well, not because her father had died—it would take months for her to grasp what that meant—but because she felt like a leaf caught in the flood of her mother’s grief.

Her mother had left Ani with a neighbor named Mrs. Donnelly who had white hair and a stiff-legged miniature poodle. The woman’s living room was filled with glass figurines and crystal knickknacks. Ani’s feet, in their white anklets and red patent- leather shoes, stuck out from the sofa cushion. It was summer. The fat white poodle sat panting next to Ani on the couch, its pink tongue hanging out. Mrs. Donnelly, who brought out a tray of lemonade and cookies, gave Ani sidelong glances that were filled with pity.

Over the next days Ani’s mother came and went, leaving her with a baby-sitter, a college girl with pink lipstick whose name was Cindy. In the evening Violet clutched the telephone to her ear and talked Armenian to her parents. There must have been a funeral, but Ani wasn’t invited. Her mother came home with an urn full of ashes—all that was left of David Silver. Baba and Grandma arrived in New York with a borrowed truck that they loaded with the Silvers’ belongings. On the drive to Watertown, Ani had accompanied her grandfather in the truck. Violet and her mother had followed in the car.