Twice, page 15
A few months later I came home from work and she was silently grilling two lamb chops. No music. No “Hi, Alfie.” Just the dull sizzle from the frying pan. I looked at her in her sweatshirt and pajama bottoms and said, “I’m going to make a sandwich.”
“What about these lamb chops?”
“I don’t want those.”
“I made them for you.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“What am I supposed to do with them?”
“I don’t care.”
Her voice rose. “You don’t care?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I said no!”
“Neither do I!” she screamed and flung the frying pan across the room. It clanged off the wall. We stood there staring in opposite directions, hearing only the sound of each other’s angry breathing. We both knew we weren’t talking about lamb chops.
“This is ridiculous,” I finally mumbled.
“Maybe we should separate for a while,” she said.
“Maybe we should,” I said back.
Nassau
LaPorta escorted Gianna Rule to a large hotel ballroom, the kind where convention groups hold their breakfasts. It was empty save for a few round tables, and the detective motioned his suspect to sit down. He went to close the door when he spotted Sampson running down the hallway, holding a large iPad.
“These just came through,” he said, panting.
He handed the iPad to LaPorta, who grinned. Finally. The full security camera footage from Alfie’s time at the roulette table.
“Let’s see how she reacts to this,” LaPorta said.
They approached the table where Gianna was busy texting on her phone and shaking her head. Why wasn’t her assistant answering? She needed to tell the magazine folks she was delayed, although she didn’t want to say why. She didn’t know why.
“All right,” LaPorta said, pulling out a chair. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
Gianna studied the man, who appeared to be in his early fifties. American. Mustached. A tad overweight. He wore a tan button-down shirt and a forest-green tie but had no badge or uniform, unlike the police officer standing behind him.
“My name is Detective LaPorta,” he began.
“OK . . .” Gianna said slowly.
“I work for the casino.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“Do you want to tell me about the wire transfer?”
“What wire transfer?”
“The two million dollars.”
Her eyes widened. “Two million dollars? I don’t have two million dollars to send anyone!”
“It was sent to you.”
“To me?” She laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“I do.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
She pushed back in her chair.
“Honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
There it is, LaPorta thought. Just like Alfie predicted.
“The money was sent by someone you know.”
“Who?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
“I don’t have a clue, Officer.”
“Detective. I’m a detective.” He nodded toward Sampson. “He’s an officer.”
“Well, Detective—and Officer—I’m afraid you’ve made a mista—”
“The money came from Alfie Logan.”
She froze for a moment. Then her head dropped, as if she were being pranked. She ran a hand through her hair, looked up, and smiled broadly.
“Now I know you’ve made a mistake.”
“Why?”
“Alfie Logan doesn’t have two million dollars. Or anything close.”
“He won it.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Where?”
“Here.”
LaPorta froze an image on the iPad and handed it over. Gianna gazed at the photo of various people around a roulette table.
“Isn’t that your ex-husband?”
Gianna frowned and exhaled.
“Oh, God, it is,” she mumbled. “I heard he was in town.”
LaPorta leaned forward.
“You want to tell us how he won the money?”
“Who?”
“Your ex.”
“I thought you said Alfie won the money.”
“Yeah. Alfie. Your ex.”
“Alfie?” She laughed loudly. “Alfie and I were never married. God, no!”
She pointed to a man in the photo standing alongside the roulette wheel.
“Mike. That’s my ex.”
Six
The Composition Book
Things my mother said she loved about me:
“The way you pray.”
I think a lot about heaven these days. The dying often do. I wonder, if there is such a place, will I be overcome with its magnificence as others are? Or am I destined to experience things differently? The allure of heaven is that it’s a second chance, right? But I have had second chances all my life. They’ve only left me with a failure to appreciate.
When Gianna and I separated, I told her I would find a place to live nearby, but I knew I wasn’t going to stay in New York. I took what money I had out of the bank and headed straight for the airport, where I began a long journey of risk-taking adventures, hoping to erase my wife’s haunting looks of disappointment. This was when I still believed that a heart could be distracted from itself.
I flew to China and took a thirty-hour train ride through the Gobi Desert, following the Silk Road trade route. At one point in the mountains I disembarked and wandered off. I tried not to focus on Gianna, but I wasn’t very successful. I kept wondering what she was doing without me. I turned when I heard a train approaching. Then, as if moving in a dream, I stepped onto the rails. I wasn’t planning to kill myself. Just trying to empty my head.
I watched the train grow larger as it approached. I heard the horn, or alarm, or whatever they use, blasting at me. Only when I could make out a figure behind the front car glass did I holler “Twice!”—and was instantly back at the Xi’an railway station that morning, sitting on a blue plastic bench.
A minute later, I was thinking about Gianna again.
I repeated this failed daredevil bit in numerous spots around the world. I joined a mountain climbing group in the Pyrenees in Spain, and when we stopped to rest on a large crag, I quietly unhooked, turned from the others, and flung myself off the side. I remember how quickly their screams faded as I fell. I slammed my eyes shut while yelling “Twice!,” then opened them, safely back in my tent that morning.
There was a great white shark encounter in Australia that still kind of haunts me (they are terrifying creatures, even if you know you can escape them) and a foolhardy motorcycle jump in the Philippines. When tempting death failed to move me, I tried a monastery in Malaysia for three months, to see if doing nothing was the answer. A waste of time. I thought of Gianna through most of the meditations. And the food was lousy.
During this long, ruminating walkabout, I met many people. I made small talk, ate meals, even went to bars with a few of them. There were plenty of women to connect with—backpackers, local workers, vacationers, escapees from the rat race—but I stayed away from relationships. I didn’t want to complicate matters with Gianna. I kept my wedding ring on my finger.
But I was lonely. Now and then, if I spotted a woman I found particularly alluring, I’d find myself thinking not about my wife, but about Nicolette Pink and that moment in the elevator, with her suggestive purring as she undid my belt. I visualized it more than I should have. I missed Gianna’s tenderness. But I fantasized about Nicolette. A split had formed in my heart. And here is another Truth About True Love: only a whole heart can support it.
I finally decided to go back to Africa and see what had become of the village where my family once lived. It took me a while to find it, but once I got there, I was pleasantly surprised. It had grown some, and the plumbing in the buildings had improved. But the cinnamon dirt soccer field was still there, as was the small church, and overall it hadn’t changed that much, given the thirty years that had passed. No one remembered me except the village pastor, who smiled when he first saw me and leaned backward, as if looking at a skyscraper.
“How tall you have become!” he said.
He was completely bald now, with a gray beard that reached his chest, but he still wore a tweed jacket over his clerical collar. And he still had a goat. A different goat.
“Your father?”
“He’s good, yeah.”
“And your church back home?”
“Yeah, also good, thanks.” I was lying. I hadn’t been there in decades.
“We were blessed to have your mother with us for the time she was here, and we are still sorry she went to our Lord so soon.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
“Come and pray with me, Alfie,” he said.
I followed him into the small church, and he knelt and recited his devotions in Swahili. He ended with the “Our Father,” and nodded to me to join in English. I hadn’t said it in years, but I still remembered every word. When we finished—“for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen”—the pastor looked over and whispered, “Well done, Alfie,” and I choked up because my mother used to say the same thing. I thought about what she and my grandmother had both told me before they died: “I want, and you want, and God does what God wants.”
Was this what God wanted? My meandering life?
✶
Before I left, I asked the pastor if he still let the village kids ride an elephant on Saturdays. He grinned and said, “Oh, yes, Lallu still amuses them.”
“Lallu is still around?”
“Of course. Elephants live a long time.”
I wanted to see for myself, so I caught a jeep ride out to the farm. To my surprise, I still recognized the owner, who was standing on his porch, leaning on a long cane. When I said “Lallu,” he pointed to his son, who was working on a nearby tractor engine. He looked to be about my age and was wearing a tight yellow soccer shirt and lime-green basketball shorts. When I introduced myself, he looked up, a toothpick in his mouth.
“American?”
“Yes. I lived here as a boy.”
“Why?”
“Missionary work.”
“You teach my people God?”
“My parents.”
“You should teach them money. That what we need. Money now. God later.”
“OK.”
“You have money?”
“Not really, no.”
A fly buzzed between us. He swatted it away.
“My name is Alfie.”
“Juma.”
I offered my hand, which he looked at, then shook weakly.
“You want elephant?”
“I’d like to see Lallu, yes. I used to play with her.”
He rolled the toothpick in his teeth.
“You want to buy her?”
“Buy Lallu?”
“You have money?”
“I can’t buy an elephant.”
He made a snick sound with his mouth. “Elephant worth a lot.”
“To who?”
He stared for a moment, then gave up on the conversation. He nodded to his left, and I followed him past a large shed and rows of cassava and mango trees. Surrounding them were makeshift wooden fences, and on every post was a yellow box full of bees, designed to keep elephants away.
Juma slapped his shoe in the dirt and kicked at some stones. We walked for a few more minutes until I heard the sound of snapping branches. And suddenly, there she was—Lallu, standing beside a large tamarind tree.
There are no words for when an elephant first comes into your view. Only that your eyes widen and your heartbeat accelerates. Lallu’s ears were longer than I remembered, and her massive back more hollow. But it was her.
I instinctively froze in place. Elephants have an incredible sense of smell, so I knew she’d already picked up my scent. And I knew to let her react before I did. Her ears moved slightly. She took a few plodding steps forward.
Juma watched curiously. Soon, Lallu was just a few feet away. She lifted her trunk and uncurled it into my chest. It should have frightened me, but it didn’t. Knowing I could time jump if things got dangerous helped. But honestly, it felt so familiar. Lallu ran her trunk along my head then behind my shoulders. She seemed to be nudging me toward her. I eased in and she made a soft noise. Juma laughed.
“She remember you, man.”
“You think so?”
“Listen. She telling you.”
I felt myself smiling broadly, flushed with a nostalgic joy that came rushing back like a kid running to greet a parent at the airport. I edged closer into Lallu’s massive legs, and she wrapped her trunk under my arms.
And in that unexpected embrace, my soul seemed to melt and my need to wander melted, too. I took in the feel of her scaly skin, and the long blue African sky above us, and the sticky heat, and the smell of the dirt, and I flashed back on my many Saturdays here, and my mother, who had come to this place to do good, to be better, and a little girl named Princess who brought me red mabuyu sweets. I was suddenly overcome by a yearning, if not a grief, for my once-innocent childhood, before I had the power to undo the Lord’s timelines. On a calendar, it was thirty years since my days here, but with all my jumps and life corrections, who knew how long it had really been? Or how old I actually was? Lallu and I shared a memory that almost no one else in the world could: the version of me before I became different.
Gianna shared it, too. I remembered as kids when she said we should move here and build a house by the sea. I realized how lucky I was to have her in my life. Of all the things that had happened to me twice, she was the best.
I blinked back tears. I looked up into Lallu’s small, steady eyes, and understood another Truth About True Love: it makes you feel like you belong someplace.
“I need to go home now, Lallu,” I whispered.
Juma spit out the toothpick.
“Why you talk to her, man?” he said. “She don’t understand you.”
But I think she did.
✶
I was back in New York a week later. I could have called Gianna to say I wanted to see her, but it had been months, and I didn’t want to start things back over the phone. I got a room at a hotel and took a long hot shower. Since all my clothes were filthy from my travels, I stopped at a department store and bought new underwear and socks and jeans and a decent shirt. Then I grabbed a cab to our apartment building, took the elevator up, and stood outside the door.
I sucked in a few breaths, excited to see her to the point of giddiness. I had an apology practiced. And a new sense of patience. Mostly, I just planned to tell her how much I loved her, and promise to show her, to do better, to be better. I gripped an envelope with some photos of Lallu that Juma had taken, and I knocked.
No answer.
For a fleeting moment, I wondered if she’d moved. I knocked again, loudly. Nothing. I still had my key. I fished it from my wallet and tried the lock. It worked. I let myself in.
The place was the same, but I could feel my absence everywhere. All the possessions were Gianna’s. Her sweater on the couch. Her sunglasses on the counter. Her purse. Her magazines. None of my coffee cups in the sink, or jackets on the back of a chair.
I waited a few minutes, then started to feel like I was trespassing. I removed a single photo from the envelope, Lallu and me, with her trunk pushing my hat over my eyes. I placed it on the coffee table, imagining it a small surprise for Gianna. I had my hand on the door, about to leave, when I heard the sound of the elevator opening down the hallway, and then her voice, animated, saying “I couldn’t believe it, you know?” I heard a response from another voice, a man’s voice, and I retreated, suddenly trapped, and before I could do anything the door was swinging open and I was looking straight across at a stunned Gianna, wearing a lavender turtleneck and a leather coat and standing in front of a guy whose face was instantly familiar from my freshman year at college.
Mike.
The soccer star. The guitar player. The guy who’d broken her heart.
“Alfie!” she screamed. “Oh my God! What are you doing here?”
“Twice,” I whispered.
✶
Now, Boss, if you’re hoping for an explanation of what Gianna was doing with her old boyfriend, I don’t have one. You’d have to ask her. I time jumped back to, of all places, the department store fitting room, where I was breathing hard and cursing until a salesman on the other side of the curtain said, “Sir, are you all right in there?”
I spent the next hour weighing whether I should return to the scene and confront Gianna. She was still my wife, after all. I thought of every possible reason why she could be coming to our apartment with her old college beau, but my mind kept returning to the worst one, that she was seeing him again, that she was sleeping with him.
That I had been replaced.
I knew if I revisited the moment, I could not undo it. I’d be stuck inside the apartment, staring at Mike and his perfect teeth and two-day stubble, and forced to have my confrontation with Gianna in front of him. I didn’t want that. But I couldn’t just leave things. I needed to know more. So I took a cab back to our apartment building and found a spot across the street, in a Korean grocery store. I positioned myself by the window. And I waited.
I must have looked at my watch a thousand times. I scanned the faces of everyone who came down the block. New York City is an endless cast of characters, pouring out of taxis, pushing through doorframes, turning around the corners. I wasn’t sure if I’d missed Gianna by looking the wrong way at the wrong moment.
But then a bus stopped at a nearby intersection, and I caught sight of her stepping off. There was Mike right behind her. They walked together, heads nodding in intermittent conversation. They stopped momentarily by a vendor selling mixed nuts, but Gianna shook her head, and they continued on. I kept waiting for her to look my way. What was I hoping? That she’d break into tears? Push Mike away and come running with her arms out, screaming, “Alfie! You’re back!”
