The Believers (25 page)

"Oh, God..." Karla covered her mouth with her hand.

"Don't tell me you haven't done it."

"No, no, I have. I finished it during my lunch break today. It's in my case at work. I just forgot to bring it back with me."

"Jesus."

"Don't worry, I'll bring it tomorrow. One day won't matter."

"I've been asking you for that essay for weeks. What's the matter with you?"

"I'm sorry, I really am. I've just been so busy--"

"And everything else takes priority, doesn't it? Sorry, Mike, my dad's ill. Sorry, Mike, I have to look after my fucked-up brother. Sorry, Mike, one of my patients is having a crisis..."

"What do you want me to do? Go back and get it now?"

"Yes, actually. I think you should."

"You're kidding."

"No, I'm not." He assumed a prone position and started doing pushups.

Karla sat watching, waiting for him to relent.

"Go on," he said, looking up after a moment. "If you're going, go."

Khaled's store was still open when Karla got to the hospital. Reluctant to have to explain her tearstained face, she hurried past without stopping. Up in her cubicle, she turned on the computer and began to print out her essay. When the first page shuddered out onto the printing tray, she picked it up and read it over with an embarrassed frown.

"...My relationships with my parents and siblings have always been extremely good. We are a close-knit family, with a shared interest in political activism and social justice. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of going as a family on peace marches and other similar events..."

There was a knock at the door. Before she could reply, the door swung open, and Khaled entered. "I saw you downstairs just now," he said. "I called to you, but you didn't hear."

"Sorry, I was in a hurry."

"Are you okay?"

She turned back to the printer. "Yup, I'm fine."

"How come you came back to work?"

"I had to pick up some papers I left behind."
Go on,
she told herself.
Why don't you just say it?
"It's a document for an adoption agency, actually. My husband and I are trying to adopt a baby. I had to write an autobiographical essay for the application form." She spoke in a great rush, babbling the words like a child in a school play.

"Wow," Khaled said.

"Yeah."

"You didn't tell me you were trying to adopt."

"Well, it's a pretty recent thing."

Khaled laced his hands together and placed them on the top of his head. "This is big news."

She gave a smiling half-shrug. "I guess."

"Congratulations."

"Thanks."

The printing had stopped.

"So what have you said about yourself?" Khaled asked.

"What?"

"In your essay. What have you said?"

"I don't know. Stupid stuff."

"Like what?"

Karla picked up the papers from the printing tray. "I don't want to tell you. It's too dopey."

"Oh, come on, tell me." There was something vaguely hostile in his cajoling tone.

"Well, I said I'm caring and, you know, interested in social justice. I said I'm a cheerful and positive person--"

"Really?" he interrupted. "Cheerful and positive?"

"What?"

"I don't know. To me, you always seem a little sad."

"I am not sad!"

"You have a sad face."

"Thanks!"

"It's not an insult."

"I'm not a sad person. I'm always smiling."

"If you say so."

Angrily, Karla shuffled the essay into order and slid it into an envelope. "Right," she said, "I'm done."

Khaled did not move. "So when are you going to get this baby, then?"

She sighed. "It's not like that. There's no definite date. We have to be approved first. They have to do a home study. It takes a long time."

They stood, listening to the eerie susurration of the social work offices after hours: the
glub-glub
of the water cooler in the hall, the distant ping of an elevator, the whirr of a late-arriving fax in the next-door cubicle.

"I'm sorry," Khaled said, at last. "I'm sorry you're doing this."

Karla nodded. "I know you are." The tears in her eyes were making the room wobble and shimmer. She looked down at the envelope in her hands. When she looked up again, Khaled was standing in front of her.
I don't care,
Karla thought, as he lowered his face to hers.
I don't care.

His hands were dry and hot. He tasted of something spicy that he had eaten for lunch. When he put his mouth to her ear, his breath roared like the sea in a shell. "Is this okay?" he whispered. "Do you want this? You must tell me."

She felt a spasm of impatience.
For god's sake, don't make me say it.

He drew back. "Karla?"

She closed her eyes. "Yes," she said, her voice cracking with embarrassment. "Yes, go on, yes."

CHAPTER
16

To lend some semblance of truth to the boast of "a romantic garden" posted on the blackboard easel out front, the proprietor of the tiny Indian restaurant on Fifth Street had strung garlands of colored lights across his concrete backyard and placed tea lights, bobbing in bowls of water, on each of the frail plastic tables. Overhead, in the branches of a gnarled crab apple tree, a speaker broadcast woozy instrumental medleys of easy listening classics. In this urban oasis of music and light Rosa and Chris Jackson were sitting one evening in late July, discussing Chris's latest documentary project, about a family of methamphetamine addicts in rural Minnesota.

"The grandfather is my favorite character," Chris was saying. "He's this sweet-looking old guy with all this white hair and a big old mustache. You see him sitting around the house in his carpet slippers, watching NASCAR and you think, Sweet guy. Then he gets into his car with his fifteen-year-old granddaughter, looking like he's taking her to soccer practice or something, and it turns out he's driving her into town so she can turn tricks. He's his granddaughter's pimp!" He gave a little creaking laugh. "You gotta love that."

Rosa, whose attention had been momentarily hijacked by a mellow saxophonic rendition of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon," smiled and took a sip of red wine. "You certainly have some rich material," she said. It was a while since she had last spoken, and she could tell by the exaggerated precision with which she was now forming her words that she had grown a little tipsy in the interim.

"Yeah," Chris said contentedly, "I'm excited about it." He pointed at the plate of sweets in front of them. "What do you think of the gulab jamon? Out of control, right?"

Rosa gave a queasy smile. The gulab jamon was quite revolting, she thought: a sort of rose-infused gummy bear.

"When I was in India," Chris went on, "I was totally addicted to this stuff. Most places in New York don't do it right, but the chef here is really amazing. He used to work for an Indian maharaja or something. He's a really interesting guy, actually. We've hung out a couple of times and smoked bidis together. He's got some great stories..."

Rosa sat back, letting the drone of Chris's auto-conversation wash over her. There was a kind of genius to his dullness, she thought. There was nothing you could throw at him that he would not instantly transmute into something achingly uninteresting. Not that it mattered. Tonight, she was sloughing off her judgmental, perfectionist self and going with the flow of things. Chris was fine. She had already decided that she was going to sleep with him.

"This is fun," he said. "I'm really glad you agreed to come out tonight."

"Me too."

"I was kind of surprised, to be honest. You said no so many times. I figured you were still angry with me."

"Angry?" Rosa smiled skeptically. Chris was far too insubstantial a figure to have ever inspired her wrath.

He gave her a coy look. "You don't remember, do you?"

"What?"

"Ah, well, if you don't remember, maybe we should just let it lie...."

"Tell me. When was I angry?"

"The last time we spoke at Bard, you were pissed with me because I'd lost your copy of
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed
, and because I hadn't turned up to hand out pamphlets at something or other. You gave me this huge dressing-down in the middle of the street." He paused. "You really don't remember any of this?"

Rosa shook her head.

"You called me 'a complacent cretin.'"

"You remember the exact phrase ten years later?"

"Sure. You don't forget something like that."

"I'm sorry. I must have been extremely obnoxious."

"No biggie," Chris said with an unconvincing shrug. "It's all water under the bridge."

Rosa looked around the yard. The garlands of colored lights overhead were beginning to blur and multiply. Partly out of a desire to make up for her past sins and partly out of boredom with the precoital preamble, she leaned across the table now and placed her hand lightly on top of Chris's. "Shall we go somewhere and have sex?"

It took them fifteen minutes to walk to Chris's loft on Second Avenue. Having committed to the evening's denouement, Rosa was anxious to be done with it. Chris was still fiddling with his keys when she pressed him up against the building's heavy iron front door and thrust her tongue in his mouth.

"Take it easy," he said, pushing her gently away.

Sheepishly, she withdrew, and they climbed the six steep flights of stairs to his apartment without further physical contact.

Inside Chris insisted on opening wine and turning on the stereo. Rosa watched hazily as he fussed over the choice of CD. At last, having settled on the songs of a depressive English folksinger, he turned to her with an amorous smirk. "Let's get those clothes off you, shall we?"

She had worried that his conscientious mood-setting portended a tediously connoisseurial approach to sex, but this concern proved quite unfounded. Chris fucked with all the speed and abstracted efficiency of a dog and the act was accomplished in just under ten minutes.

"Did you come?' he asked afterward.

Rosa, ever the truth teller, shook her head.

"Is there something you'd like me to do?"

"No, no," she said quickly. "It's fine. I mean...I don't have to, every time."

"Yeah." He nodded sagely. "A lot of girls are like that."

Rosa glanced at him in amusement. How fortunate to be so credulous!

"I had a girlfriend a while back who had an orgasm about once a year," he said. "It wasn't like the sex was bad or anything. The sex was amazing, actually. She just never came. So at first, I was like, This is crazy, you need to go and see somebody. But she was like, No, orgasms just aren't that important to me..."

Rosa watched him finger his tiny scribble of chest hair. He was never going to stop talking. The act of intercourse had been a mere caesura in the truly erotic business of listening to himself speak.

"Can I ask you something?" he asked.

"Sure."

"Do you work out?"

"No."

"I just wondered because you've got a great body, you know, but if you worked out, you could really tone it."

"Ah, yes," Rosa said. "My roommate tells me the same thing."

"You have a roommate?" Chris laughed in amazement. "Man, that must be
rough
. I can't imagine having to share a bathroom at our age..." His laughter dwindled to a contemplative
Haaaaa.
"It's funny the way things turn out, isn't it?" he said. "I mean, I used to be so intimidated by you at Bard. You were so glamorous."

Rosa registered the insult of the past tense without resentment. Fair was fair: ten years ago, she had called him a cretin. He was entitled to some payback.

"I mean," Chris said, "if you'd asked me then what you were going to be doing when you were thirty, I would never have guessed that you'd be working in an after-school program and living with a roommate. I would have thought you'd be running an African country or something."

Rosa looked up at the ceiling. What was the Talmudic phrase she had read in one of Rabbi Reinman's books? "Accept the truth from whoever gives it." Chris was right. She had not fulfilled her promise. She had lost her way. The proof of it was her presence in this bed.

A sudden nausea came upon her. She sat up and clambered out of bed.

"Have I offended you?" he asked, a little too eagerly,

She shook her head. "No, not at all. I just need to pee."

In the bathroom, she surprised a cockroach feasting on Chris's toothbrush. It scuttered across the sink and then froze, as if regretting its cowardice. Rosa had just enough time to kneel down at the toilet before unleashing a terrible purple gush of tikka masala and red wine into the bowl.

"Hey," Chris shouted from the other room. "Do you want to hear some really amazing Ghanian hip-hop?"

"Sure," she called out. She sat back and wiped her mouth on her forearm. The cockroach was perched on the sink faucet, waving its antennae good-naturedly at her. Through the window above Chris's bathtub, there came a distant drone of traffic and the plaintive
wap-wap
of a tattered plastic bag trapped in a tree.

Please God
, she prayed,
if you exist, if you want something from me, give me a sign: tell me what I should do.
She closed her eyes, waiting for a voice, a sudden gust of wind, the thud of a soap bar falling from its dish. But there was nothing, just the flapping of the plastic bag outside and the tinnitus of Chris's voice wafting down the hall. "These guys are meant to be really amazing live..."

She stood up, disgusted with her own childish egotism. The God she believed in--or wanted to believe in--did not sit about in his cloudy house, waiting to help out drunken doubters with proof of his existence. He was not some whimsical dispenser of signs and special favors. He was
God
, for God's sake.

"Are you okay?" Chris asked when she returned to the bedroom.

"Yeah, fine."

"I thought maybe you were going to be sick."

"No, I'm good."

She began to get dressed.

"What's up? What're you doing?" Chris asked,

"I need to get back."

"Why?"

She hopped about, trying to force her foot through the twisted leg of her pants. "I have stuff to do in the morning."

"Are you mad at me?"

"No."

"Is it what I said before about--"

"No, really. I just want to sleep in my own bed tonight."

He watched her putting on her sandals. "Are we going to get together again?"

She turned to him. He was not a bad person, she thought. A fool, certainly. But not a bad person. "I don't think so," she said. She smiled kindly. "I appreciate your asking, though."