Tizita Page 26

  Me: (Leaping in like an idiot, but there you have it. Nothing in life happens without a leap or two.) “Oh, Assefa, was it what Stanley said?”

  Assefa: (Giving a slight grimace before offering a non sequiturish) “Fleur, can you ever forgive me?”

  Me: “I do. I will. Well, anyway, I want to.” I paused. “But I really wouldn’t have forgiven you if you’d succeeded. Assefa, how could you?”

  Assefa: (putting up a hand.) “Stop. Please. My parents are already driving me mad with their questions. But I have to admit, I feel strangely relieved. And not just to be alive.” I shoved that one into a cupboard in my mind. One not too far back, since I knew I’d want to pull it out and examine it as soon as I was alone. “But, listen, Fleur,” Assefa went on, “there is one weight still heavy on me. I am ashamed for what I, how I ... treated you that last night.”

  Me: “It was my fault. I should never have—”

  Assefa: (Interrupting) “No. It is not your fault. We must be truthful with each other, or we have nothing. I nearly raped you. Maybe more than nearly. I don’t know what I— That music. I just—”

  Me: (Totally confused.) “The music? What are you talking about?”

  Which is when he really began to talk, and I really shut up and listened. I was able to bear it only because I was secretly pinching my outer thigh the whole time. He told me he couldn’t remember his childhood without thinking about Makeda. He admitted that he remembered more about her than Bekele and Iskinder, more than even his mother and father. The expression on his face when he spoke her name nearly killed me, but it also filled me, strangely, with a kind of desire. Not for Assefa himself—that seemed to have been swallowed by a particularly dense department of the void—but for Makeda. As if I’d caught an invisible virus from Assefa. I wanted to see her, touch her, get inside her skin. Better yet, be her.

  But Assefa was saying, “Fleur, the worst of it was—well, not the worst, but when I was there in Ethiopia, I thought about you. Some devil had decreed I would never be satisfied. Never be a whole man. I could not have her, and—”

  This was what I was dying to know: “But why couldn’t you? Did she reject you?”

  “No. She didn’t. She didn’t have to.” A shadow came into his eyes. “She’d had a botched genital mutilation as a girl.” Then he whispered, “As if any of them aren’t.” A terrible dizziness overtook me, but, relentlessly, Assefa continued. “It was done to her during the war that my family escaped by having left. She was captured. By our own people.” He gave a bark of laugh that made me want to get up and run away. “It ... ruined her capacity for pleasure. Or at least her desire for it. Here I’d been imagining that the country my parents had ripped me from was some kind of Eden.” Assefa’s voice grew hard. “Instead, it is a shit pile of poverty, ignorance, violence.”

  It must have been his sorrow speaking. I was far too ignorant about Ethiopia, but I knew that the home of the Blue Nile was brimming with richness and beauty. There was no way such a large and diverse land could be encapsulated in a few bitter words. Whether or not the Ark of the Covenant was actually kept at Aksum, Ethiopia was where the oldest human fossils remains had been discovered. It was the birthplace of our species. I’d never been there, but I sensed—no, knew—it was something special. I knew it from the graciousness of Assefa’s parents, from the streaks of shiny color woven into Abeba’s white netelas, from the bitter-fruit taste of bunna and the longing in tizita and the way Teddy Afro’s “Aydenegetim Lebie” made me feel. I knew it from Assefa’s seriousness of purpose and his wry wit. But still. “Genital mutilation?”

  Assefa took pity on me. “I’m sorry. That was cruel. But you wanted to know.”

  “I do. Well, I think so, anyway.” I’d also thought I must be mutilating my outer thigh, but no matter. “But I—”

  “What, Fleur?”

  “ Assefa, we never had a chance, did we?”

  “Because of my neurosis?”

  “Neurosis? No. Because neither of us have any idea who we are yet.”

  When I told Mother at least that part of it, she laughed. “Oh, my sweet, sweet girl. By the time you get to my age, you realize that we keep thinking we know who we are and discovering we’re something else. The damned thing won’t stay still, no matter how much we want it to.”

  I wasn’t so sure I agreed with her. Mother was Mother, and Gwennie was Gwennie, and Stanley was ... well, maybe Mother was right. But I didn’t like it. It made the void even more voidish. I didn’t like it one bit.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Fleur

  MOTHER WAS CONVINCED that a weekend together at Two Bunch Palms was just what I needed to conquer my unyielding blues. Built by gangster Al Capone in the 1920s (and with bullet holes in its walls to prove it) and memorialized in the Hollywood send-up film The Player, the resort was everything the rest of the country derided and envied about SoCal. During our two hour and forty-one minute drive there, we saw more freeways than any human should be subjected to, opening thankfully into vast expanses of desert dotted with sagebrush, arrestingly shaped cacti, and dazzling splashes of orange ezperanza, purple lupins, and sweet-faced monkeyflowers.

  Nearing our destination on Two Bunch Trail, we passed a woman with way too much make-up walking a calico cat on a leash. The animal looked terrified. When I shared my observation with Mother, she nodded. “I don’t doubt it. I’m all too familiar myself with the terror of being saddled with something, or”—her eyes raked over the woman with the too-plump lips—“someone you can’t bear.” With Mother, the purgatory of her years in a miserable marriage was never far from her mind.

  Over the next few days, we kept ourselves occupied perusing copious quantities of mindless magazines, taking Tai Chi classes in the Yoga Dome, chatting about nothing and everything during long walks amid the spectacular rock piles of Joshua Tree, and tracing a path in Big Morongo Canyon alongside a creek created by a major earthquake fault. Mother was sensitive enough to let me fall into long, meditative silences as we floated in the resort’s mineral water grotto. On our last night, we splurged on an unbelievably yummy dinner at Tinto’s in Palm Springs.

  But a life avoided is a life unlived. I returned to the Fiskes’ with relaxed muscles, pampered pores, and an actual suntan, determined to pour my energies into quantum entanglement. Even a particularly unsettling phone conversation with Assefa didn’t deter me from my resolve. On Monday morning, I leapt out bed, cooked up an omelet seasoned with fresh basil and thyme gifted to me by Two Bunch’s friendly head chef, and sped off to Caltech, eager to dive in.

  But my heart sank as soon as I arrived. It would have to be Bob Ballantine who was there to greet me. The room was empty but for him, the sun shooting a shaft of light through the window blinds, which someone had opened at enough of a skewed angle to be annoying. He looked up with a surprised smile, which he quickly adjusted into an expression of sympathy.

  There was nothing for it. I had to approach and be subjected to what I made sure was a brief hug, pulling away with an embarrassed little laugh. In recent bouts of torturing myself over my shameful lack of interest in Assefa’s original Ethiopian incarnation, the void had used the face of Bob to punish me for the faithlessness of my desire. Now, with the actual man right before me—and despite the fact that he’d shown me nothing but kindness (well, that and a rather determined concupiscence)—I struggled to understand how I’d gotten myself into bed with him. I couldn’t help but notice that he had the usual glob of lox fat between his teeth, this time between the two front ones. Did he never breakfast on anything but smoked fish? Or brush his teeth? I saw, as well, that he’d evidently given up on the gel he’d been using in his hair. It was longer now, edging toward the shoulders of his navy pullover, upon which his ubiquitous dusting of dandruff was hitching a ride.

  “I’m so sorry, Fleur,” he murmured, his eye tic seconding the motion. But my ears were attuned to what sounded like Stanley and the gang coming up the hall.

  I turned to see
my mentor burst into the room with his old verve, moving forward with something just short of a serious hop. I’d returned from Two Bunch to discover that Stanley had secretly been conspiring to arrange Assefa’s transfer from UCLA to New York-Presbyterian University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell. The favor had clearly gone at least a little way in assuaging my mentor’s gargantuan guilt. According to Stanley, Assefa had submitted to sitting down with him this past weekend and, while he hadn’t exactly forgiven him for his atrocious lapse of decency, he’d heard him out, eking out in return a terse acknowledgment of Stanley’s sincere regret.

  I’d called Assefa as soon as I heard, gingerly broaching the topic and getting a reply that pretty much skirted his encounter with Stanley. He delivered the relieving news that his doctor had removed his cervical collar, and he actually sounded a little enthusiastic about moving to Manhattan, where his parents had a few friends among the city’s large Ethiopian contingent. He’d stressed how grateful he was to be able to continue his training at one of the top-rated cardiac wards in the country. “Even better than UCLA, Fleur,” he’d said, and I told myself it was an awfully good sign that such things were starting to matter to him again.

  I had no idea how Abeba and Achamyalesh were going to bear letting him go. Mother had speculated that the fact that Achamyalesh had actually been hired to teach two classes at Pasadena City College would go some ways in filling the empty nest. But this was from the same woman who’d moved halfway across the country to live near a daughter she’d never been terribly close with. I worried about them. I’d said as much to Assefa.

  Which led to a surprising outburst. “They’re not saints, you know!”

  “I didn’t think they were.”

  “I mean, really.”

  “I don’t ... Assefa, what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that you should probably let your pal Stanley off the hook.”

  I’d sat heavily onto my bed then, displacing Jillily, who quickly rearranged herself by my side, kneading the bedclothes and purring ecstatically. Given my sense of dread, her pleasure felt discordant. I nudged her off the bed, and she set herself hunched in the middle of the room with her back to me, her tail angrily slapping the floor.

  “The truth is that if anything sent me over the edge, it was my father telling me that Makeda was conceived from him fucking her mother.”

  I think my heart actually skipped a few beats. “What!”

  “You heard me. I came back from Ethiopia to learn that she is my sister, Fleur. My fucking sister.”

  “Half sister,” I’d murmured.

  “Does it really matter?”

  I had to admit that it didn’t. And I have to admit now that I simply could not take in his disclosure. The pain he had to have felt was unfathomable.

  Then he’d cried out, “Oh, God, I should not have told you this! I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It is a private family matter. You have to swear to me that you will never tell another soul.”

  “Assefa, I promise. But listen, you’ve been through way too much. I hope you can meet this new incarnation with an open heart.”

  “Is there such a thing, Fleur?”

  “I used to think so,” I’d replied.

  I could have sworn he was crying, too, when we ended our call.

  I’d rolled over and lain across my bed, pressing the edge of my pillow against my mouth as I sobbed over what felt like a particularly dark instance of the Butterfly Effect. To think that the event of an Ethiopian anthropologist having sex with another man’s wife would ripple across continents and time to prompt a moral crisis for a froggish American Nobelist and settle a secret weight inside another Nobelist’s soul.

  How could Assefa and I live separate destinies when we knew so much about each other? Could he ever find relief from his obsession with Makeda? His passion for me seemed to have evaporated entirely. I have to confess that it hurt.

  Had I lost mine for him? If it was there, it had gone into hiding. But the beautiful god who’d chosen me and me alone to love, whose naked skin was satin and whose voice a velvet whisper (“Come, dukula, let me see you”), who’d teased me with his humor and his hands and his quicksilver mind, offering endless avenues of surprise? I knew the strains of “Aydenegetem Lebie” would haunt me forever, reminding me of something exceedingly precious that I would never know again.

  Meanwhile, here was my team, looking at me with so much love and worry that I choked on my own spittle. Fighting for breath, tears rolling down my cheeks, I gestured that I was okay. Katrina put a hand on my arm, and Amir proffered a handkerchief. It definitely helped to blow my nose. I offered his hanky back to him. Eyeing it distastefully, he refused to take it. Everyone laughed.

  “She’ll be fine,” Stanley pronounced, and for some reason, I started to choke all over again.

  Never one for tact, Gunther rolled his good eye, muttering, “This is the one who’s going to convince Congress to fund our work?”

  At that, my choking morphed into giggles. Stanley gave a few silly hops, and I started waving the handkerchief in Amir’s direction. He backed away, and I went after him, weaving around desks and chairs. When we came to a breathless stop, he panted, “Reminds me of Lord Hanuman,” which got everyone jabbering over the time the chimp had thrown volleys of turd balls in this very room, with us scurrying frantically for cover.

  “Wait,” I said, still breathing hard.

  “What?” asked Amir.

  “I can’t believe I forgot. Serena McKenna’s invited me to come visit Lord Hanuman at Gombe. Jane Goodall’s actually going to be there.”

  Amir’s eyes widened. He grabbed me and demanded, “When?”

  I did a quick mental computation, realizing that in the midst of Assefa’s crisis, I’d not gotten back to Serena. “Oh, God, soon. Like maybe next week.”

  “Call her,” Amir said urgently. “I’ll come with you.” His expression was intense. I could sense everyone watching us. Amir was usually the happy-go-lucky one of our team, wearing a peace sign bindi when the mood struck him, teaching Katrina Bollywood dance routines, cheering madly for Naduparambil Pappachen Pradeep, no matter which Indian football team he was playing for. But about two things he was always serious: our work on P.D. and his love for Lord Hanuman. The chimp, that is. He’d cared for Lord Hanuman ever since a friend had liberated him from a lab that no longer needed him, and he’d relinquished him with great sadness to Jane Goodall’s Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve when it was clear the creature needed more wilderness for his wildness than could be provided by the environs of Pasadena.

  I mentally kicked myself. It should have occurred to me that Amir would give half a leg to see his simian friend again.

  Stanley H. Fiske caught my eye. He nodded slightly, silently mouthing the words, “Say yes.”

  Gunther looked lost in thought. I knew he was aching to get back to our work on dematerialization. I also knew that Congress was in no mood to hear testimony from me while they were busy shutting down the government for the umpteenth time.

  Katrina and Tom were holding hands and grinning at me encouragingly. They were the physics team members Amir was closest to, besides Adam and myself, of course. Which I suppose is a roundabout way of saying that Gunther, our team Eeyore, had a rather hard time getting close to anyone.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll email her as soon as I get home.”

  But when I got back to the Fiskes’, things were in disarray, throw pillows littering the living room floor as if Lord Hanuman himself had tossed them. It turned out that Gwen had gone to her ENT Dr. Nastarti, who’d confirmed what she’d secretly been suspecting. She was slowly going deaf in her good ear. It wasn’t too bad yet, but it would likely be in the not too distant future. Needless to say, she was pretty distraught, sobbing on my shoulder, “Fleur! I don’t want to get old! I hate this!” I couldn’t imagine what it was like to feel your body failing, piece by piece, but I did know I was terrified of losing either of the Fiskes. I was relie
ved to hear Stanley’s keys rattling at the front door. Sensing my distress as soon as he entered the room—it might have been the moans coming out of my mouth and the little mini-flaps of my hands—he took hold of the situation, telling his sister in a gruff tone (which I knew belied a deep filial devotion), “Gwen, get a grip; there are such things as hearing aids.” And then he turned to me. “You’d better get online quick and see if you can find a flight for yourself and Amir.”

  At which point Gwennie shifted gears, demanding, “Flight? With Amir? What’s going on?”

  I let them sort it out and retreated to my bedroom, grabbing my laptop before flopping onto the old Liberty fabric covered armchair that Mother had bought during our New York incarnation and which Jillily had managed over the years to shred into a tattered version of its previous glory. But just as I located a website detailing which airlines flew to Tanzania, I heard my meowing cat ringtone. I got up from my desk chair and frantically fished around in my purse for my cell. As soon as I answered, Assefa burst out excitedly that he’d firmed up his own travel plans. In four days, he’d be leaving for a two-week seminar offered by the American College of Cardiology in D.C. before flying directly to New York to begin his new incarnation.

  Four days. I dropped heavily onto my bed and stared bleakly at the Einstein poster on the opposite wall, for once unamused at one of our species’ most brilliant men sticking out a tongue that had to be longer than Miley Cyrus’. Scratch any delusion I’d had that I was even partially over Assefa.

  I tried to sound enthusiastic. A few months ago, he might have picked up my distress. But now he was full of details of the apartment he’d be sharing with a couple of med students and a U.N. staff member—one from the U.S., one from Addis Ababa, and another born in the Omo Valley. I knew about the Omo tribes, had seen videos of how they celebrated themselves with ornate body and face decorations. They were an unusually beautiful people. I resisted the temptation to ask Assefa what gender his roommates were.