Hope Makes Love, page 8
At such Craig moments, I wonder what encouraging signal I could possibly be giving off. Is politeness enough? I don’t want to be rude. Rudeness demands a courage I don’t possess. Saying “Go away” seems to me as likely to attract unwanted attention as a smile. When the Craigs come at me, I do my best to give them nothing to react to. I listen without comment, keep my face as still as possible. Sometimes, after a Craig experience, I check my expression in a reflective surface — my phone, an elevator’s mirrored wall. Was I smiling without being aware of it? Did my face betray me?
During those precious moments in the Steakhouse when Craig left me alone, I was observed by a table of two men seated by a bank of red-silk rhododendrons. They looked at me alternately, never together, so that I felt passed between them. A man dining with his wife sat across from me on the other side of the room. His back to the wall, he was able to stare at me over his wife’s shoulder as she looked down to slice her teriyaki-glazed salmon. And three middle-aged women in running shoes twice asked me to join them because, they said, I looked “lonely.”
Stupidly I’d left my phone in my room, and when I returned I saw that Lesley had left a message. “You’re not answering and it’s dinnertime so … I guess that’s a good sign?”
She wanted to let me know that Adnan had called again. “I have this funny idea that he may be the father of your unborn child, so I’m a little torn about leaving him completely in the dark.” She assured me all she’d told him was that I was out of town. But after she did, Adnan asked if he could send me an email. He understood that I didn’t want to be reached directly. He was asking only that she forward his email to me. It was more a plea, said Lesley, than a request.
“So, Hope, this is me checking. Are you okay with me forwarding an email? There is a man here dangling at the end of a string and I am rather loath to leave him like this. Call me back or email me. But it would be nice to talk to you.”
I emailed and told her to go ahead. Adnan’s email arrived just over an hour later.
Dear Hope,
Thank you for let me speak to you in this letter. I have been think about what I wish to say to you for now three weeks. The phone call we had some days ago was not enough. We did not talk about any important things. So that is why I am need to send you this letter.
As I have said to you please forgive my language and also in this letter. English is not my first language because I came here with my parents when I was sixteen years old from Syria but I have always tried very hard and I have done my best. I use the spell check and I think clearly and most times it is enough but not when I speak to someone who deserves better words, stronger words, and that is what I believe about you.
I do not want say silly things in this letter. You are not a woman who wants silly things. I know that. But I want to say all from what is in the heart. When you touched my hand where it stuck to the syrup that day was special to me. It was only one small thing but if that was only what happened, then that day would be special. Because I already know at that time that you are a good woman. I don’t know why. I don’t know what tells me. But I know. And that is why I gave you the things that night when I cooked at the party. You were alone. You had friends but no special friend beside you. And I saw you then and wanted to be that special friend. But how? So I made you things that night and that was good because it was why you talk to me at the market.
And so we were together. One time together for a small few hours. Not enough. But it was all the best times of my life for me. That is what I feel. And maybe that is a silly thing. But for me it is what is true. And what we did, all the things in the kitchen, and cooking, and what I made for you and we ate and all of that time was very good. It was very good, Hope. And all of that would be enough.
But then you put your hand to my mouth and we kiss, my Hope, we kiss. And then we make love on my mattress. On my bad bed which was mess and nothing you should see but you said it was okay.
And you gave me a gift of trust Hope. A special gift. You said for me to look. And so I look and what I see can never make me feel good about the people of this world. I am sorry for crying. I am sorry to not be brave like you. And I said then forgive me and I hope you have forgived me but I think you have not Hope. I think because I cried is why you will not talk to me or see me now. Or maybe something else I did wrong. So I am very sorry Hope. I want to make it better. I will not cry. Never more will I cry Hope I promise!
I promise to you Hope. I promise to be good for you. And I am a man who keep all his promise every one.
Please let me come where you are.
Adnan
THIS IS MOSTLY, I THINK, the effect of a changing ratio between dopamine and serotonin. High levels of dopamine are released from cells in the VTA — the ventral tegmental area — which project into the reward systems of the striatum, driving motivated thinking. “I want what I want.” And high dopamine levels may work to suppress serotonin, leading to depression and anxiety. “I feel bad without the thing that I want.” And low levels of serotonin trigger excessive activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus which has been associated with obsessive thoughts and behaviours. “Only what I want can make me feel better.” This is how the brain creates infatuation, the fixation on the object of affection. It’s a model for the effect we will try to induce in Emily.
I can think about it only like that, if I try. I can think about this man’s pain as a natural product of biology, as evolutionary wish-fulfillment, nothing really to do with me. If I think about it like that, then it could have been any other woman. A Sally in that chair at the dinner table. An Anne. Alone, conventionally attractive, overdressed, trying too hard to relax among people she barely knew. An object for this man’s VTA to latch on to.
Biology can explain why he noticed me, and wanted me, and why he thinks he needs me still. What it doesn’t explain is why I spoke to him in the market. Why I touched his sticky hand. What it doesn’t explain is why I went with him in his van, let him do the things he wanted to do. Let myself let him. Why I allowed him to see what even I won’t look at: the empirical evidence that I am not any woman, as much as I might wish to be.
And it doesn’t explain why, on the bottom shelf of the bar fridge in my hotel room, sits a tinfoil package of crumbling tarts. Or why I open this package each night, and take these things he formed with his hands, and in the dark, lay them on my breasts.
ZB Transcript 9
MARCIE WHAT THE FUCK is going on with Lino?
Jesus Christ, it’s been like a week since I heard from him. He won’t answer his phone. He won’t return my messages. Last I heard the investor dude was ready to go and now it’s like total radio silence. I want to see papers! Like, contracts and shit. I want this guy’s money in the bank. I want my formula guy working on tastes. Has he given you anything? Lino I’m talking about. Or shit, formulas even. Tastes. Cranberry Quench, for fuck’s sake. A list of ingredients. Anything you can fax me, send it through the hotel. I wanna know something’s happening.
Right now I’m just sitting here. I’m in the conference room waiting for Hope, watching a goddamn tube light spazzing out over my head. Yeah, that’s first class, Hyatt.
Hope called me about eight this morning and said she needed a few hours because she hadn’t slept. Like I did any sleeping the way this goddamn knee is killing me.
Anyway, she gave me an assignment. The next deal is we have to make Emily laugh, so I have to come up with some things that’ll get laughs from her. And they can’t be like chuckles, either. They have to be big laughs. She had some French word for it.
So that’s what I’ve been trying to do all goddamn morning. I went outside and I walked around like the doctor told me, because he said the knee might seize up on me if I don’t. Gotta keep moving. So I’m out there walking around like an idiot trying to remember what gets Emily laughing. And she has a great laugh, you know? I mean, get her going and she’ll be holding her stomach and gasping and tears’ll be running down her face. So, it should be easy, right? Yeah. But I can’t come up with a damn thing.
Pebbles is the only thing I can think of. She’ll do something goofy and for sure that’ll crack Emily up. I mean, thinking back … that was probably the only thing that got us through the last year. It’s like Pebs knew it was close, you know? She knew something was up. And she just worked like hell to keep Emily laughing. She’d haul out an old Hallowe’en costume or come up with some stupid stunt. I remember … I remember one time they were learning levers or something in school and she rigged up this lever to fire those squishy candies into her mouth. You know those gummi things? She got Em to sit down for this and started pelting her face with these gummies and pretty soon Emily’s howling. Just fucking howling, she can’t catch her breath. Pebs was ten or eleven then but … she had some goddamn degree in keeping her mom happy.
But I don’t wanna rope Pebbles into this, you know? It’s on me. It’s all on me.
Pisses me off I can’t think of anything.
Probably if a piano fell on my head Em would find that pretty funny. Or got arrested for tax fraud or something. That’d be a gut-buster.
OKAY, I GOT one thing.
I figure it can’t be like taking her to a funny movie, right? Because that’d be a date and no way she’s going for that yet. I mean, that’s where we’re trying to get to. Trying to get past that, even. But one base at a time. You can’t score direct from first.
So I’m thinking it’s gotta be a surprise, something unexpected. Like we’re doing one thing and something else happens. Walking down the street and a bird shits on me or something. I mean, she’d laugh at that. Guaranteed she’d laugh. And if I was wearing a new suit? Oh man, she’d kill herself. But it’s not like I can get a trained bird to shit on cue in the next twenty-four hours.
Something along those lines though, I think that might work. It’s not much, but maybe I can talk it through with Hope. Whenever she gets down here.
Wednesday, April 22 /cont.
I CALLED MY MOTHER FIRST. It seemed easier that way, starting with what I thought would be the smaller bite of penance. And it was important to me that I be able to tell Lesley I had made that call. That I hadn’t ignored her advice. My mother may no longer be (if she ever was) a mast to which I can rope myself. But I fear the loss of Lesley. Without her observance, and her sturdy presence, I would feel windblown.
Lesley and I have been friends since my second hospital stay, which makes it ten years. She was assigned to me as a peer counsellor and we hit it off. I forgave her her woolly eccentricities, her vaguely vegan diet (mouldy cheeses her weakness), her tendency to drop her voice to a comforting murmur whenever I showed any anxiety (so that sometimes I was only made aware of my anxiety by the low hum in her words), and her ridiculous love of fringes in all things — clothes, throw pillows, theatre. She, for her part, forgave me my eight fewer years, my ninety fewer pounds, and my tendency to bolt from certain kinds of pressure like a cat unable to forget being stepped on.
When I left home, seven months after the hospital, it was because Lesley had offered me a room in her third-floor apartment. Together we endured a rotation of downstairs neighbours, including a singer of Chinese opera, a pot-smoking professor of environmental studies, and a single mother of one inconsolable toddler. At any hour this desperate mother would scream at her wailing child to stop crying, which had the effect anyone but apparently her might have expected. And Lesley and I would sit in the dark listening for a change in the tenor of the mother’s voice that would signal a need to intervene. We didn’t know precisely what we were listening for, but felt we would recognize it when it came. And for me it was oddly comforting, those minutes or hours with Lesley, listening to the anguish of a mother and her child. It was an anguish bound within limits. You could perceive the borders of it, and know that this pain, while real, could never touch you. I sometimes imagine that men find a similar consolation in watching football.
We left that apartment before we heard the telltale change, but not because of the noise. A larger apartment opened up in a house Lesley had long admired and so we moved, and we have lived and moved together ever since. Over the years Lesley has taught me to love Houjicha tea. She has introduced me to writers, both living and dead. She has brought me ginger ale when my stomach is upset, and she has taken small, sharp implements from my hands.
So I needed to speak to my mother first. And when the morning had aged past its pink and I knew she’d be up and sitting with a coffee and a Sudoku, I called.
There was a pause when I said hello, and I understood that she was standing in the kitchen, calibrating her reaction. Her first word or two were important. She was undoubtedly angry and hurt, still, but knew better than to unleash it first thing, all at once. And I’m sure some part of her was relieved too, and grateful, simply to be allowed to hear my voice. This is the terrible power of the damaged daughter. The confusion, pain and yearning that we invoke simply by being. We’re like gods.
“Darling,” she said. And I was proud of her for that choice, a kind of masterpiece of caring and distance. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, Mom.”
“Are you still in … was it Buffalo?”
“It was and is.”
“Working.”
“In a way.”
She chirped a little laugh, more, I supposed, from tension than anything. I wondered if she was eyeing her cigarettes.
“And the weather’s good there?”
“Mom, it’s not even two hours away. It’s the same.”
“I think that’s not true, actually. But it’s … not important.”
For a moment there was no sound. Only the loud, empty silence of the wounded parent.
“So, Hope —”
“Mom, I want to say I’m sorry for walking out on you —”
“For walking away, yes. With such …”
“It wasn’t fair.”
“No.”
“So that’s why I’m calling, okay? I’m sorry.”
“All right, well.” She took a deep breath. In the background I briefly heard the sound of running water. She cleared her throat. “And so … you’re pregnant. You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure. I had some morning sickness, and I did a test that came up positive. But I haven’t been to a doctor yet.”
“Well, you definitely need to do that.”
“I know.”
“So, sweetheart … I’ve been wanting to ask you and I didn’t get a chance to before —”
“Mom —”
“Are you happy, darling? Is this a good thing?”
We breathed on that for a while, my mother and I.
“Perhaps you don’t know yet,” she said finally. “It can be a shock for anyone. Have you talked —”
“You’re …,” I started. “Mom, you’re the only one I’ve said anything to about this.”
“Oh. Not even Lesley?”
“Not yet.”
“Oh, so …” I could tell she had started to cry. “Well, thank you, Hope. Oh, that’s … thank you. What about … what about the father?”
“No.”
“Well, when are you coming back, darling? Because I don’t —”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Hope, you must come home,” she said. She was crying openly now. “Because right now you’re alone and I … I don’t want you to be alone!”
I waited for a moment. Experience had taught that it was better to let the space between us expand with quiet than to try and shove words around my mother’s weeping.
“I just …,” she said eventually, “I would like to see you, sweetheart. And know you’re all right. That’s all. I want you to be safe. And … there are things that I can do.”
“Okay, Mom.”
She tried to chuckle. “A grandmother can come in handy, you know. I mean, if that’s what you decide.”
We were like snap-off pieces, my mother and I, displaced from the home and the life we had known, she in the granite-countered kitchen of a house that held no history for her, with a man who could never be blamed, me in a hotel room cleansed of memory at the same time every day. We were loose parts detached from what had formed us, waiting to be assembled into something new.
“Well, I’m going to make Bill his coffee now, darling,” she said. “Please call if you need anything at all.”
BEFORE I PICKED UP THE phone again I stood in the shower for fifteen minutes, against the impersonality of its streak-free porcelain, the brittle smile of its buffed chrome. The bathroom light was off, in contempt of the wraparound mirrors. In my life, I have made friends with bathrooms. We achieve intimacy incrementally. If we have time enough, we become familiar, we share secrets. This hotel bathroom will never know me; it will never earn my trust.
When I called Lesley, she was in her least forgiving mood.
“You are better than this, Hope,” she said. “It’s indefensible what you’re doing.”
I told her I wasn’t trying to defend myself.
“This poor man.”
“Did you read the letter?”
“Yes, I read it. I didn’t feel bad about it either, and I still don’t. This is a situation you created.”
She sounded as if she were putting away groceries; her breathing had the huffiness of exertion, of cans shoved into place, cupboards slammed shut. But what she was closing off were my paths of avoidance. There have been times in the past when Lesley has gripped my face in her hands and forced me to look her in the eye. I could tell it frustrated her now that she could not grab hold of my cheeks.
