War of the Encyclopaedists (26 page)

“Why does everyone keep asking me that? I'm fine.”

“You just seem a little down.”

“He said he's fine,” his mother said.

“I know that, I heard him.”

“Then why are you pestering him?”

“I'm not.”

“No wonder he's down.”

“I'm not down,” Corderoy said.

“For God's sake, it's Christmas Eve,” his father said, turning sharply
onto their street—the car hit a patch of ice, Henry swerved, and they plowed into the mailbox stand on the corner, knocking it flat and sending the cedar shingles of its small roof tumbling into the darkness. The bumper and the hood of Henry's pristine mid-nineties Lexus were bent out of shape.

“Just great!” his mother said. “Wait till the neighbors check the mail.”

“There's no mail on Christmas,” his father said.

“It doesn't matter. They'll see it. How much is that going to cost us? Two, three thousand? Not to mention the mailboxes.”

“Will you just shut up a second.” No one said anything for a moment. Henry slowly backed up, then drove down the street and parked in the driveway. He turned the car off, but he didn't get out. Neither did his mother. The four of them sat there, steam from the car rising up to the icicle lights on the gutter. Corderoy needed a drink. Fuck the resolution. Fuck organic happiness. It wasn't worth this.

Without looking back, his father said, “Boys, finances aren't so good right now. The papers haven't been making any money—it's a dying business, as you know, and Grandpa's been using up what money there was to keep the papers alive. And to keep himself alive.”

“What?” Corderoy said.

“I'm trying to explain something.”

“Why now? What does—”

“Just listen, it's important. When Grandpa's gone,” his father continued, “which won't be that long, there won't be much of an inheritance. And I'll be out of a job. Without a pension. So we have to be careful. We won't be able to help you out much. With tuition, or rent, or anything else. You understand? Hal? Max has a scholarship, so this is mainly for you. We have to watch—”

Corderoy got out of the car and walked up to the front door alone. He knew his mother kept a bottle of Christian Brothers brandy, for eggnog, in the top cupboard, near the salad spinner. But fuck eggnog. As soon as he got inside, he was taking a swig right from the bottle. But the door was locked. So he stood there under the green glow of the holiday porch light, like a child or a dog, waiting for someone in charge to let him in.

31

Montauk's parents had met him at the airport in their blue Volvo, and his mother, Veronica, after a long hug, insisted on heaving his heavy green duffel into the trunk herself, boasting about the boot camp class she attended every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

During the ride home, his father had barely spoken. His mother, who worked as a collections manager at the Smithsonian, had given him a rundown of everything he'd missed in their personal lives. In chronological order. She'd told him how they remodeled the upstairs bathroom, how a tree fell on the neighbors' car during a windstorm in October, how his father got a cortisone shot in his knee. She told him about the latest acquisition at the museum of some intricately carved Chinook dugout canoes. She told him that she'd been looking at travel packages to Peru, that she'd always wanted to see Machu Picchu, that they were going to go, once she convinced his father that it wouldn't kill him to leave the country—which first meant convincing him to leave the house and his easy chair. She also wanted to take a trip to Greece. She was half Greek, named after her grandmother, Berenike Stavropoulos, and she'd never been. Oren, who'd been at port in Athens for a few days during his time in the Navy, had no interest in going back.

What she did not tell Montauk, and what he found out over the next two days, was that his father, now retired and dealing with a variety of joint pains, had retreated so far into the comfort of his easy chair
and his fifty-inch LCD TV that he rarely left it except to grab another beer. He was also getting fairly drunk each night. He had only three or so bottles, but he was drinking high-percentage Belgian beers. Montauk's mother, not a beer drinker herself, hadn't caught on that different beers varied in alcohol content. She would call to Oren from the kitchen, telling him about an article she was reading in
Newsweek,
and he would sit in his chair, bristling like an artichoke, giving her curt responses or grunts or sometimes just ignoring her.

It wasn't all that surprising to Montauk; it seemed like a natural outgrowth of what had characterized their relationship for decades. Perhaps personality traits, like ears and noses, became exaggerated as one got on in years. He sensed something deeper, though, and it wasn't until Christmas dinner that it surfaced.

His mother disliked cooking, but she made it a point to put together a meal on special occasions. And what could be more special than having your son home from war on Christmas?

This year's tragedy was the roast. It was like eating beef jerky soaked in water. Montauk choked down a slice and a half as a kindness to his mother, who spent most of the dinner bemoaning the unbelievable fact that George W. Bush had been reelected. “After all the lies about 9/11 and everything else,” she said. “You know people talk about moving to Canada. Maybe it's not such a bad idea, where this country is headed.”

“You can move if you want to,” his father said. “I'm staying right here.”

“Who's going to pay the bills?” his mother said. “Who's going to buy your fancy beer?”

His father refilled his glass from a bottle of Delirium Tremens and took a swig.

“Who's going to wash your underwear?” Veronica laughed awkwardly, then poured an excessive amount of gravy on her slice of dry roast.

Montauk had always thought of his parents as left-leaning political moderates. His father, presumably, still was. But his mother had become increasingly liberal since her son's deployment. She set her silverware down and looked at Montauk with her you're not-going-to-
believe-what-I'm-about-to-tell-you face. “I went canvassing for Kerry,” she said. “In Virginia. On the weekends. Everyone I talked to, everyone, was against this ridiculous war.”

“It couldn't be everyone, Mom,” Montauk said.

“Everyone. And Virginia went to Bush by more than eight percent. It's disgusting.”

After they'd all had a piece of pie, Montauk's father brought his plate to the kitchen, came back and patted Montauk on the shoulder, then said, “I'm turning in.”

“It's only ten, dear,” his mother said.

“I have to fall asleep before she gets in bed,” he said to Montauk. “She moves around so much it's impossible to fall asleep.”

His mother scoffed, then turned to her son and said, “I don't move that much. He just doesn't move at all. He's like a stone. With gas.”

He helped his mother with the dishes, told her a few sanitized stories about things he'd done and seen in Baghdad, and by eleven, his mother was ready for bed as well. Montauk went into the den to check his e-mail, there being no Wi-Fi in his parents' house. He deleted a fair amount of spam and newsletters he'd subscribed to, willingly or accidentally, then sat there staring at his lonely inbox. The inbox of a man whose friends had forgotten him. He scoffed at his burst of self-pity and navigated to the Encyclopaedists Wikipedia article. He clicked
edit
. But he couldn't figure out what to write. He swiveled around in the desk chair, observing the room, which felt oddly lived in. There was a pillow on the couch, along with a blanket. There was a Patrick O'Brian novel and a glass of water on the small table near the couch. And there were his father's slippers behind the door.

REUNION

32

Mani's father, Nasir Saheli, was born in Tehran in 1949 to an upper-class family of doctors, lawyers, and academics. When the United States helped overthrow Iran's prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953, the Saheli family cheered the shah, friend of the West, for bringing Iran onto the world stage. When the shah declared his autocratic rule in 1961, young Nasir had been thrilled that his emperor was the foremost leader of the Middle East. How proud they were when the shah extended suffrage to women. And with the oil boom of the seventies, when the shah and his family earned billions of dollars, the Sahelis were happy to overlook the growing wealth gap, of which they were on the better side. In 1973, at the age of twenty-four, Nasir graduated from medical school at Tehran University and began practicing pediatrics. In 1977, as Khomeini's militant anti-shah protestors took to the streets by the thousands, Nasir treated a young girl with an ear infection and fell in love with her beautiful older sister, Shaady Binazian.

Shaady was twenty-two at the time. Her father had owned a fabric store and labored to get the best education possible for his oldest daughter. Shaady was fluent in Farsi, Arabic, English, and French, and she had just secured a teaching position in the Foreign Languages department at Tehran University. Though she was not as pro-shah as Nasir, she was a vehement supporter of women's rights, and she longed for an Iran with the freedoms of the West. They married in '78 and had one happy and carefree year until the shah was deposed in the Islamic
revolution and Shaady was removed from her teaching position and forced to obey Islamic dress code. What upset her more was that her younger sister was barred from attending regular schools, and though she was only thirteen, she was now of legal age to marry.

When Saddam invaded the following year in the midst of revolutionary crisis, their hope for a secular and socially progressive Iran dwindled. By late '81, the Islamic revolutionary sentiment had swelled enormously with the war effort, and Nasir and Shaady had begun talking about leaving Iran and moving to America. And then Shaady discovered she was pregnant. As they sat in a café sipping tea, only the small oval of her face revealed by the mandatory hijab, smoke rising from a building down the street, and soldiers with automatic weapons standing on the corner, she told Nasir that she would not raise a child in this repressive and hostile environment.

Nasir had enough family money to get them to Boston, where a distant cousin helped set them up in a small Brighton apartment to start over in the American middle class in the winter of '82. Shaady was lucky enough to get an adjunct position at Boston College, teaching beginning Farsi and Arabic. When Mani Saheli was born in September, Shaady took only two weeks off before returning to teaching, depending on Nasir and a friendly Irish family who lived below them to watch over Mani.

Nasir's medical license would not be accepted in Massachusetts until he redid at least three years of residency with fresh graduates five years his junior. He drove a taxi to keep the family afloat. Those first years were difficult, but by the time Mani was ten years old, they had moved to a large house in Newton. Nasir was running his own pediatric practice, and Shaady had been promoted to associate professor, teaching Middle Eastern literature.

For a couple who had left Iran to escape the social regression of the Islamic revolution, they were very strict with Mani's upbringing. She was an attractive young girl, and there were several boys in her seventh-grade class clamoring for her attention, but her mother forbade her to date until she was fifteen. Like any teen girl, Mani secretly broke this prohibition. She began dating Jeremy at fourteen, which brought her into the entirely new social world of Goth. When she came home with
her nose pierced, her parents confined her to her room. She spent the next week lying on her bed, staring up at her poster of Marilyn Manson, playing
Smells Like Children
on repeat, and slapping her wrist with a slap bracelet until the thin fabric wore through and the sharp metal edge began cutting into her skin. As soon as she had her freedom, she dyed her hair bloodred. She traipsed around that summer with Jeremy and his Goth friends until she found a new boy, Michael, who was the bassist in an “amazing” rock band called Bonehenge. When Michael introduced her to alcohol and cigarettes, her hairstyle and accumulating number of piercings officially became a minor issue for her parents. When they caught her smoking weed a year later with Drew, her then-boyfriend, they tried to ground her for a month and revoke all telephone and computer privileges, but Mani replied by showing them her grades—straight A's—and asking with complete nonchalance what the fuss was. Aside from introducing her to pot and taking her virginity, Drew also got her interested in the erotic sci-fi/alien art of H. R. Giger, and when Mani took an art class her sophomore year, she realized that she had a talent for drawing.

She continued this way, changing social groups as she moved from boyfriend to boyfriend. At seventeen, she tattooed her back with cello f-holes to express her devotion to Eric, her nerdiest boyfriend to date, who played in the school symphony. And through the binge drinking on weekends and the after-school joints, Mani managed to keep up her grades; to her parents' relief, she was accepted to UMass Amherst.

When it came time to choose her major, Mani decided that she wanted to be a painter and chose visual art. Though her parents had backed down in these contests for years, they finally stood firm: unless she switched to pre-med or business or some major that would provide real career opportunities, she'd have to finance her own education. Mani had her first bout with depression that semester, and after seeing several therapists, she was given a prescription for Paxil. When her boyfriend Chad graduated that summer, she dropped out of Amherst and moved with him to Santa Cruz. She lived with him for nearly a year, spending her days painting portraits of the homeless and the junkies who wandered the beach. She eventually left him and made her way to Seattle, refusing to ask her parents for help. Her plan
had been to wait until she qualified for in-state tuition, then apply to the University of Washington for art. But she never quite got around to putting a portfolio together. She found a job selling produce at a farmer's market in Ravenna but was soon fired for showing up hung­over and stoned. She might have been on the street again if it hadn't been for Steph, though that situation had ended poorly.

• • •

When Mickey Montauk shipped out at the beginning of October, Mani took his advice and moved back to her parents' house in Newton, Massachusetts. For the first week, they asked no questions, and Mani lived in an alternate reality in which she'd never disappointed them, never left home, never fallen in love with a nerdy boy named Halifax who'd abandoned her (leaving a void that she filled with the generosity of his best friend), an alternate reality where she'd never married Mickey in the county court for his military benefits, where she'd been a hardworking student, making her way through pre-med, showing her parents that their struggles to leave Iran and start a new life had been worth it.

But after a week of her mother's cooking, of her father's reminiscing about his youth, the questions began.

“So, dear, what's your plan?”

Mani put her fork down.

“Your mother is asking if you're going back to school.”

“I am, in spring semester.” Mani had not decided on this, but she didn't know what else to say to end this line of questioning as soon as possible.

“Will you be getting a job?” her mother asked. “You can't simply sit around the house for the next three months.”

Mani did her best to delay answering such questions, but when her mother found her bank statement, she had to lie. Montauk's Basic Allowance for Housing had increased when he and Mani got married, and he'd set up a monthly automatic transfer of a thousand dollars to Mani's account. Mani wasn't about to tell her mother that she'd married her friend Mickey—just her friend, not even her boyfriend. So she lied and said she'd gotten a job sitting for a gallery downtown. Shortly thereafter, she moved into a studio in Allston.

It was fairly spacious and lit by large factory windows on the eastern wall. The floorboards had been coated and recoated with thick white paint over the years as they collected uncleanable grime. With all the new art supplies she bought, with the rolls of canvas, the frames in various states of construction, the stretched and half-painted canvases on easels, the tarps and sheets and oil paints, the stacks of sketchbooks and charcoals and brushes, there was not much room for actual living. She spent most of her days painting, smoking joints, and flipping through art books for inspiration. She trashed most things she began until mid-October, when, after writing a letter to Mickey, she began a painting that felt real, that felt important.

When the subject came to her, it was not at all surprising, and she knew exactly why she had chosen it: her nominal husband was an American soldier in a war zone, and the number one cause of death for American soldiers was the Improvised Explosive Device. After looking at images on the Internet and reading some firsthand accounts, she began painting a Humvee tilted onto its right wheels, the explosion from an IED lifting it off the ground, the terrified face of the driver who knew they would flip and burn and die.

What she couldn't explain, what she began doing without realizing it, was painting this scene of extreme and sober violence in the cartoonish style of Dr. Seuss, a surreal and childish distortion of bright primary colors and silly elongated shapes: striped and bendy palm trees, fantastic dunes in the background, the Humvee disproportionate and bright green, sporting oddly placed knobs and gears, the explosion bulging like an image under a magnifying lens propelling the truck right out of the canvas and toward the viewer, the driver's face squashed and birdlike, six eyelashes on his wide right eye, a small pimple on his nose, the mouth a black hole with the barest hint of a tongue, a dark red mass being sucked back into the throat, a few wisps of candy-blue hair curling out whimsically from his helmet.

She was drawing from a sense of loss; it was not an overwhelming condition but a subtle one that resided in the nethermost regions of her consciousness. The morning after she'd been hit by that dark sedan, when she'd been caught between her crushing need for morphine and the thought that perhaps she was pregnant, an entire future
had come into being, a settled future with Hal. Or perhaps without him, but with an inescapable lodestone to guide her through the rest of an otherwise messy life: a child had been born in her mind. And it had been lost.

As she perfected the last details of the driver's face, an incredible anxiety overcame her, as if she'd turned the curve of a highway, going thirty miles over the speed limit, only to see a cop car screeching off the shoulder, its manic sirens and lights propelling her heart rate and breath to unmanageable levels. And then she was done and the police shot past her in pursuit of some unknown, and as she stepped back and looked at her work, her body fell into a peaceful and unsettling darkness. She rolled and lit a joint, a small comforting light, and smoked her way to equanimity.

The next day she began work on a second painting in the same Seussian style, this time of a few bodies on the street, soldiers, clods of dirt scattered like popcorn from the small crater left by a homemade bomb. Small Iraqi children with gigantic eyes looking on from the periphery, peering out the curved windows of wobbly buildings, smiling. One of the soldiers was clearly dead, his eyes squinched into outsized X's; the other with his legs blown off, was still alive, pleading with an outstretched hand toward the foreground, the plump four-­fingered hand of a cartoon, the pool of blood and oil and dirt behind him swirling like a rainbow of melted Starburst.

It took her a week to finish, and when it was done, she felt an aftershock of what she'd felt for the first painting, but it came with a greater sense of fulfillment, that she'd brought forth value out of nothing, created something alive; she realized that she was not finished, that these were the first two paintings in a series. Over the next month, she confined herself to her studio and worked simultaneously on three new paintings. These proved more difficult, and she progressed slowly, limning the outlines of a dreamlike Bradley flipped on its back, a twisting convoy of supply trucks and Humvees, a rusty late-eighties BMW bounding through the chain-link at a checkpoint. In a month's time, though these three were still unfinished, her confidence, her feeling of impending accomplishment, had grown significantly, enough that she took high-resolution photos of her first two and submitted them to the
curators of a few Boston galleries. From then on, she worked methodically, the precision of her surreal lines and colors increasing while the rate of her progress diminished. On December 31st, she got a phone call from Mickey, on leave from his tour of duty. The last time they'd spoken, he'd flipped out and she'd hung up. She was a little wary of seeing him, but how could she not? That night, just after ten p.m., she buzzed him in and began rolling a joint while he trudged up the three flights to her studio loft. When she heard his footsteps on the landing, she panicked and quickly threw a few sheets over her new paintings, uncertain what he would think of them.

• • •

Montauk flung open the metal door and let his duffel bag thud on the floor: there was his wife, standing before him in all her pajamaed glory. They fell into each other and hugged long and close, but they parted with some minor awkwardness, neither wanting to be the first to release nor the one to hold on.

Montauk wanted to say something grand about how great it felt to see her, but all he could manage was a long pause, punctuated with “Hi.”

Mani laughed, lit a joint, took a drag, and said, “Welcome home.” She offered it to Montauk.

“Can't. Routine drug tests.”