Gods Without Men, page 39
Esther thought Lisa ought to write a book about the witch hunt, about being a mother in the spotlight. Lisa, better than almost anyone alive, knew how it felt to be a woman hounded by the misogynist news media. It ought to be a passionate book. A polemic. It could really make a difference to other women going through the same thing. Lisa toyed with the idea, but she didn’t really have the stomach for it. Not just for the writing, for what it would mean to spend days in front of a laptop, forcing herself to think back to the bad days—the hotel in Riverside, the buzzing air conditioner, the TV and the dirty room-service trays—but for the whole process of turning herself inside out. She’d had enough of being discussed and picked apart. Now that her son had been returned to her, she wanted to luxuriate in him, and she wanted to do so in private, without interference or observation, without being judged.
Esther was understanding. We all have a right to a private life, she said. You more than anyone. Esther understood the beauty of silence, the silence in which a still small voice could make itself heard. Lisa admired her for that. In the first days after she and Jaz got Raj back, they’d barely uttered a word. It was as if they both had the same fear, that something fine and fragile was being woven around them—a magic cocoon, a crystal web—and loud voices or sudden movement would shatter it. They lived like medieval peasants, cowering from signs and portents. They hid from the FedEx man.
They were, the two of them, so very delicate, so bruised. She’d hoped—and she was sure Jaz had felt the same—that, like a broken bone, they’d eventually knit back together, filaments of new love reaching across the distance between the kitchen table and the sink. They’d been through so much. It would be absurd to split up. And she couldn’t deny how hard he’d tried for her. When she’d fallen down, he’d picked her up. When she couldn’t cope, when they were forcing her to walk back up to those terrible rocks, pushing some strange child in the stroller; when she was lying on the bathroom floor, paralyzed, catatonic, trying to abdicate all responsibility, trying to stop breathing, to stop her heart from pumping blood around her body, Jaz had tried his best to look after her. He’d tried to say the right words. But (and this was what lay over them like a miasma) he’d failed. He hadn’t been able to pull her round. When it came down to it, his love and care hadn’t been enough.
They were different. Of course it had always been that way, part of what had attracted them to each other. A mutual fascination, loving contact with someone new and strange. Not exotic, though, never that. She believed she’d always made the effort to see Jaz as an individual, not a representative of anything. After they brought Raj back, Jaz’s parents had taken the train up from Baltimore. Thank God, they’d said, pressing their palms together, and for once she’d been able to agree with them. But his mother had taken it too far, standing in their kitchen with her eyes shut, her hand on the top of Raj’s head, muttering in Punjabi. Lisa had felt like snatching her son away. It’s their culture, she told herself. It’s just their culture. Jaz came from that, but he wasn’t that. Her problem with him was purely personal.
For her it was enough to have Raj back. He seemed to be unhurt. He was proof that by loving, by holding on tight, what was lost would be returned. But Jaz seemed unsatisfied. He wanted an explanation. He worried over the evidence like a dog with a chew toy, phoning the police so often she was sure he was making a nuisance of himself. He spouted endless theories. One evening she came back from work to find him poring over a large-scale map of the Mojave Desert, drawing circles with a compass. Beside him was a yellow legal pad, scrawled with notes and calculations: how far a toddler could walk in an hour; the location of the nearest public road.
“It’s so frustrating,” he said. “The area where they found him is just a blank. It’s military land, so the mapping data’s classified.”
“I’m sure the police have all the information they need. What can you find out that they can’t?”
“They’re not doing anything. They aren’t making it a priority.”
“They have other problems, Jaz. Other cases.”
“But what happened to him? What do you think happened?”
“Does it matter?”
He looked at her pityingly. “How can you say that? He’s our son. Someone had him. Someone took him away from us. How can you live, knowing that person’s still out there, ready to do it again?”
“I don’t know, Jaz. I just don’t think it’s our job anymore.”
Sometimes it seemed to her that there was only so much energy in a relationship, so much electricity in circulation between two people. As she grew stronger and more confident, Jaz seemed to wane. He lost weight. He’d pad through the house in sweats and a T-shirt, looking like a ghost. She found his listlessness irritating. “What’s happened to you?” she asked him one night, when she came home, loaded with Barneys bags, to find him collapsed on the couch, watching a true-crime show in a litter of crusted cereal bowls and the previous day’s Times. Raj was playing unsupervised in her office. He’d upended a box of pins and clips, creating a chaos of sharp points on the rug. She bustled around, clearing up, angrily berating Jaz over her shoulder as he yawned and thumbed the remote. “You’re like a stranger. You should go back to work. You were better when you were working.”
“I don’t know what I’d do,” he said. Just that. As if he’d come to the end of something and hadn’t the will to go on.
Esther was blunt. “Do you still love him?” They’d met for a coffee. Lisa had brought Raj with her, and he was being an angel, sitting quietly at the little café table, eating an ice cream. A good little boy, dressed in a new blue-and-white matelot top. She glanced at him uneasily, trying to work out if he was paying attention.
“Esther, what a question!”
Her friend arched an eyebrow, making light of her curiosity. “It’s not a stupid thing to ask. If you love him, the rest will take care of itself.”
Lisa considered the matter. “Yes,” she said. “I think I do.” Yes, dimly. Yes, for old times’ sake. Here was Esther, blowzy big-chested Esther, with her chunky amber jewelry, her silk head scarves wrapping up hair still thin from chemo, her children already at Brown and UPenn and her unapologetically fat husband, Ralph, who was always blowing in through the door with something gift-wrapped in his hands, who’d always just happened to be passing a deli or a bookstore or a bakery that sold the most delightful little macaroons. Ralph was so plainly thankful to have his wife alive that going to the office every morning was a painful separation and it was all he could do not to crush her to his big barrel chest when he came home again at night. Their home was a temple, their family table an altar. It was hard not to make comparisons.
Lisa smoothed Raj’s hair. He allowed her to do that now, without flinching.
“I wish—I wish he’d let it go. It’s like he’s still out there, wandering in that awful desert.”
The previous night, they’d had a terrible fight. She’d found Jaz staring at Raj in the way he now had, a deep silent interrogation. He was squatting on the floor, watching the boy play, with a kind of forensic attention, as if every maneuver of his pack of plastic dinosaurs might yield up vital information. He spoke without even looking up.
“Do you think he was—you know.”
“Jaz.”
“There was no physical evidence.”
“Not in front of him.”
“That’s not definitive, though. The fact that they couldn’t find anything. I mean, he was away for months. It could have healed.”
“For God’s sake, shut up! I don’t want to talk about it. And it’s not appropriate in front of him.”
She scooped Raj up and half dragged him into the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Once inside, she sat on the toilet with the lid down, hugging him tightly. He complained a little, tried to squirm out of her grasp. Jaz knocked tentatively on the door.
“Go away,” she called out. “Just go away. He’s back. Why isn’t that good enough for you?”
Of course she had the same questions. Where had he slept? What had he eaten? What was the first thing he saw when he woke up in the morning? Did they touch him, bathe him, smooth his hair? Was there one person? Two? There must, she thought, have been a woman. A couple. What was that woman thinking when she unbuckled him from his stroller and ran with him down the dusty path? Was she desperate? Angry? Insane? Each question bred more, doubling, quadrupling, a vertiginous recess of uncertainty. The only way to deal with such a pit of questions was to close the trapdoor, to refuse to look down. That was what Jaz didn’t understand. God had given their son back to them. It ought to be enough.
When the job came up at Paracelsus Press, she’d not taken it seriously. The offer came through Paula, one of the other women in the group. She was a nutritionist, friends with Karl, the publisher. They were looking for an editor. She’d immediately thought of Lisa. Instinctively Lisa found herself saying that it didn’t really sound like it was for her. Paula looked mystified. Why ever not? She’d have thought it was a perfect fit. Lisa looked through the list, and, among the titles on color therapy and dowsing, found a lot of books that were serious and considered. She was curious enough to set up an interview. Karl turned out to be a typical Lower East Side character, a rakish old communard with a graying ponytail and a little ebony stud in his left ear. He’d started off in the underground press, branching out into book publishing when the dream of a revolution in consciousness began to subside in the mid-seventies. He’d run Paracelsus out of his apartment for many years, but with the Internet (a miracle, he said, a boon) it had rapidly grown into one of the leaders in its sector. They’d had hits with an Iyengar yoga manual and an illustrated version of the Bardo Thodol, and he wanted to plow the money back into the business. Over a meal at a raw-food restaurant in the East Village, he told her he was looking for someone to work on a series about world religion, a collection of the mystical texts of the great traditions presented in a way that was neither too popular nor too scholarly, a route for general readers into the various intersecting currents of faith. She could work out of their offices on Ninth Street. She said yes straightaway.
Jaz sneered. If she wanted a job, why couldn’t she find one with a serious publisher? That word. One of Jaz’s words, like reasonable, rational, pragmatic. He read out titles in a scoffing voice. The Solar Seal: A Manual for Lightworkers. UFOs and the Manifestation of Spirit. Was that really the sort of crap she wanted to foist on the world? Sure, she admitted, some of their titles were aimed at a fringe audience. But she was going to be working on something substantial, something she really cared about. He could say what he liked, but she wasn’t going to be embarrassed anymore about what she believed.
“And what do you believe?”
“That my son was returned to me. And that I owe a debt.”
“To who? To the police? The people who found him?”
“I can’t talk about this with you.”
“Because it doesn’t make sense.”
“I know what happened. I kept my faith with Raj and he came back to me.”
“Lisa, you were catatonic. Suicidal. You told me you knew he was dead.”
“But he came back.”
“You don’t even remember. I thought—look, the idea that Raj was found because of your magical thinking is—you know it’s insane, right?”
“So because I want to do something more than sit in my own filth, eating chips and making up conspiracy theories, I’m insane?”
“Conspiracy theories?”
And so it went on. It was tiring, desperately tiring, but eventually he agreed. He didn’t want to work and she did. They had enough money. He’d look after Raj during the day when she was at the office. She hoped it would bring him closer to the boy. She was happy when she heard about the walks. It seemed healthy. A father-and-son thing. She had no idea they went so far, until one day she looked at the wheels of the stroller. They’d been worn down almost to the metal.
The job was absorbing, though she was glad she didn’t need to live off her meager paycheck. Her first commission was a book on Tibetan Buddhism, to be written by a Rinpoche in California, an American who’d studied for many years in the Himalayas. Karl was already pressing her to start work on the second volume, about medieval Christian mystics. She enjoyed being around him, working amid the heaps of papers in the little office, listening as he chatted to Teri, the other editor, and Mei Lin, who did the books. Karl was quickly becoming almost as important an influence as Esther. She grew to look forward to their one-on-one conversations, the lunch meetings over Thai or Japanese food, the sandwiches from the local vegan café. Karl was a positive force. It was his own description, but when you got to know him, it didn’t seem arrogant, just a statement of fact. He meditated. He rode a track bike. He brewed his own kombucha, scary-looking fungal cultures housed in mason jars in the office storeroom. He was enthusiastic about the history and landscape of East Asia, particularly Laos and Cambodia, which he described in passionate detail. Though he was much older than her, in (she guessed) his sixties, his body was lean and wiry. She began to wonder, idly, what it would be like to hold him, to run her hands over his thighs, his chest.
She felt as if she’d turned a corner. Every day her life seemed to get a little better. When Raj started to talk, she told her colleagues it was an affirmation, proof that they were all protected by a higher power. At the book group she and Esther and the others said prayers of thanks. She began to allow her imagination to range further. Raj was—it didn’t seem too much to use the word—a miracle. Every day he seemed to achieve something new. With a learning curve (even the doctors said this) so much steeper than normal, anything was possible. He might even turn out to be a genius, an extraordinary mind that had started life locked away from the rest of the world. She wrote off for school prospectuses, scrutinized entry requirements for gifted and talented programs. Only Jaz seemed untouched by the new possibilities. He winced when she voiced her (perfectly reasonable) wish that he be tested by an educational psychologist, to prepare him for entry to one of the elite elementary schools in the city. That (of course) provoked another fight. Why couldn’t he give thanks, like she did? Where was his joy? He told her he didn’t give a damn about being “out of touch with his light” and stormed out of the house. He didn’t come back until late that evening. He smelled sour, like stale red wine. She assumed he’d been sulking in some bar.
At other times they were united. Their friends came back. A few, at least. There were some she couldn’t forgive, others who still seemed alienated by the drama of the previous year. But there were the beginnings of a social life. They found a babysitter in the neighborhood and experimentally went out to dinner, leaving Raj in her care. It was a success. They began to buy listings magazines, looking at what was on in the city. Amy came to stay, with her new boyfriend, a very nice Nigerian doctor. Lisa cooked a dinner party, invited Esther and Ralph and another couple. Before they sat down to eat, she asked everyone to join her in a short prayer. Jaz looked stricken. The others understood. At the end, Adé boomed out a loud amen.
Afterward, as they ferried dirty plates and glasses into the kitchen, Jaz hissed at her.
“Well, that was embarrassing.”
“Why? Why would you be embarrassed?”
“You’re forcing it on people. Rubbing it in their faces.”
“Rubbing it in your face, you mean.”
“Try to understand, Lisa.”
It turned into an argument about Raj. What was possible. What the future looked like. She accused him of being willfully blind to the good things that were happening. Sometimes, she told him, she felt he didn’t believe in his own son. He said he didn’t even know how to answer such a charge.
She was triumphant. “Because you know it’s true.”
“No, because your accusation makes no sense.”
“You really ought to get your head out of the sand.”
“God, Lisa. You think I’m the one with my head in the sand? Yours is buried so far—look, I’m trying hard to be positive here. In fact I’d say I was optimistic. Cautiously optimistic. Raj seems to be doing well. But think of what actually happened. Anything could come up for him. Repressed memories, trauma. Until we know who had him, what he went through, we won’t be able to say for sure.”
That night, she lay awake in bed, listening to sirens dopplering in the distance. Barricaded by pillows, Jaz had wrapped himself in the quilt, hunched up into a rigid, accusatory ball. She’d tried to dismiss his point about trauma, telling him he had only to look at how well Raj was doing to know it wasn’t an issue. But in truth it did worry her. She had to admit she wasn’t as certain as she wanted to be. About damage to Raj, about a lot of things. For a long time she’d been obsessing—not, like Jaz, about the day of Raj’s disappearance, but the night before, her drunken odyssey into town. She’d been out of control that night. She was never out of control. Perhaps someone had put something in her drink. It was a sleazy bar, the kind of place where that sort of thing probably happened. She had only the vaguest memory of being in the woman’s car, the headlights lighting up the dirt road, the house they drove to, with its odd bulbous roof, its triangular windows, the animal-skin rugs lying on its polished wooden floors. The alcohol swimming in her head had dissolved everything into shadows. Only the stone hearth and the woman in the rocking chair had substance. She remembered collapsing onto a bed that smelled of dust and cigarette smoke, feeling a rough Indian blanket under her cheek. The two women were standing over her, talking.
