As he sat on a bench overlooking the Pacific – its sparkling, its Technicolor blues, its beckoning and hypnotic disappearance at the horizon – his phone rang.
He fumbled it out of his pocket. “Hey, Jewels.”
“Yes?”
“Jack. Come to New York.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“What about here? What about the orchestration?”
“They did that already in New York.”
“Why am I here?”
“You mean why were you born?”
“Why am I in Los Angeles?”
“I don’t know. It was supposed to have been done there, but they must have found a quicker way to get it done here.”
“Who are they?”
“The people who manage this kind of thing, whoever they are. No big deal. Hop on a plane and come here for the board meeting.”
“Okay,” Jules said. He wondered how he would fare with these people, who exhibited the carelessness of great wealth.
Amina Belkacem
JULES CHOSE A WINDOW seat on the port side of the aircraft so that on his way east he would be able to look across the expansive landscape in north light. At 40,000 feet, two miles higher than Everest, the world below would seem at peace. In clear weather, the silent action – as if to confirm an intractable state of beneficence outside the realm of human affairs – would be of clouds and their shadows moving slowly across deserts, mountain ranges, prairies, and endless farmlands punctuated by thin exclamation points of almost immobile white smoke.
When the plane was airborne with wheels retracted, but still in tight maneuvers before setting its course, a disembodied voice filled the cabin. Half the passengers looked into the air. As Moses could testify, rich, authoritative, disembodied voices are both comforting and disturbing.
“This is your captain speaking,” it said with the ease and authority of practice and command. “We have some weather in the Southwest, so we’re going to take a more northerly route to New York today. We think we can make up for the time that would normally be lost, by getting a boost from the jet stream, which is farther north than usual, and why on the southerly route there’s the heat and humidity making those storms. We’ll be in the jet stream twice as long as we would have been, and hope to get you to New York on time.
“Meanwhile, we’ll be flying right up the center of San Francisco Bay, almost as if we’d departed from San Francisco International. Those of you on the left side of the aircraft will get a good view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate.” The microphone clicked. Then he came back. “And, on the right side, the Oakland section of the Bay Bridge, and Berkeley. Then the valley, the Sierra, and we’ll be on our way. Thank you for flying with us today. I’ll be turning off the seat-belt sign in just a few minutes.”
Not long after, they started up San Francisco Bay. Jules could see the shadow of the plane speeding along the water, and to the west, from their fairly low height before the climb to transcontinental cruising altitude, the Peninsula came into view. First the glittering water, wrinkled and refracting; then industry and highways; then a light-green residential area patchworked with houses overshadowed by trees; the wide open, less green, but still verdant Stanford campus; rolling hills with dry, golden grass, almost silvery white; deep-green, fog-watered mountains; and beyond them the frigid blue of the Pacific, ending at a thick wall of fog that seemed as big as a continent. The land below appeared to be a paradise, the kind of place Jules had seen in his mind’s eye when he wrote the piece, a place where with luck the burdens of history might be left behind. He fixed his eyes upon the garden spaces and great trees between the university buildings and the town. He was often enthusiastic about beautiful places, but this was something more. He felt inexplicably that he might have a chance there unlike any he had had in his life, and as the plane quickly carried him away, he yearned for it.
“WHY AM I GOING to my office? What am I going to do in my office?” Amina Belkacem said to herself aloud, confident that no one would hear, because there was no one. She squeezed the brake levers of her bicycle so hard that its rear wheel left the ground for a moment, and the front wheel skidded on the path for three or four feet. She enjoyed this because she had done it out of anger, and it was decisive. But anger immediately gave way to the despair of someone who has been abandoned. And in her case, it was after thirty years of marriage.
She dismounted from the heavy English bicycle, its tubular frame a deep cobalt blue, and walked it to a lone bench. Long ignored by the groundskeepers, the bench was covered in dried eucalyptus leaves and surrounded by piles of them blown its way by passing bicycles. Amina leaned hers against one end of it, swept the leaves off the other, and sat down, staring ahead at the deserted grove of pale, massive trees. Anger, then to the brink of tears, then strong feelings like those of first love, came and went, one following the other in a terrible beating.
She cried, and afterward felt a little better, but her emotions were like maritime weather – small storms, squalls, sudden clearing, a ray of sun disappearing, all very confusing for the sailor who nonetheless tries to keep her prow headed into the wind. Students rushed past on their bicycles, oblivious of her. She regarded them maternally, knowing what they did not know and remembering how youth had carried her through gales of chance. They lived in a blind world that was yet wonderful. Sayyid, at sixty-seven, was insane to think he could make a new life with a twenty-four-year-old. When and if he would be eighty and in need above all of compassion and possibly diapers, she would be thirty-seven, running marathons with her long legs, not even at her sexual peak. Then what? Serves him right.
Amina, sagacious and lively, sixty-one but looking no older than forty, was still beautiful in a way that was inimitable and lasting, even if not to a shallow man. She had crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, but these combined with her smile to make her even more alluring and attractive than when she was younger. She radiated happiness, love, intelligence – and mischief. Though practically children, her male students by the score fell in love with her, and, long before, she had learned to put them off while simultaneously comforting them. Sayyid had had no such experience, so when an astoundingly leggy and vacuous graduate student – her doctoral thesis was on women and bus stops – had fallen for him, he was as gone as if he had jumped from a cliff at Yosemite. He had never given Amina children, because he couldn’t. Despite this, Amina had stayed with him.
They bought the house in 1998, at the peak of the dot-com boom, for $550,000. While still in France they had put another $200,000 into it before they moved in the next year. Stanford gave them both tenure when they transferred from Paris-Sorbonne, and even with California taxes, the vastly higher salaries plus a federal tax rate lower than what they paid in France made them feel rich for the first time in their lives. The dot-com bubble deflated and, later, in the crash of 2008, they thought the house value would lessen commensurately, but were incredulous to find that Silicon Valley was an exception to the rule. By 2014, real estate agents were pestering them every week with offers of $2.5 million and more. The house was in her name, and even though California was a joint property state, Sayyid was a son of a bitch and she was sure that he was so crazy now that he would just walk away from it – as he had walked away from her that morning to move into the rental hovel of his seductress and sit there for the rest of his wretched life on a beanbag chair. After everything found its angle of repose, Amina would have, one way or another, three or four million, some Social Security from the U.S. and France, and either a pension or, if she continued working, her considerable salary. But money was not relevant to a broken heart.
Though the cycles of conflicting emotions would quickly come and go and were terribly taxing, still they pushed her slowly and steadily forward, and with time were not merely cycles but spirals. Pain would lead to recognition, and recognition to resolution as the hours passed on the bench. For example, at first she was hurt, and then angry, to reflect upon ho
w much he had changed, weakly floating on the tides around them even as she held fast. She had watched him move with the times so that now he would approach with reason and detachment something like a love story, and exercise indignant, overloaded passion in politics and economics. What had happened to him and others that they mocked sentiment in the love between men and women and treated public policy with the drive and resentment of spurned suitors? Sayyid had become a different person. Whereas he let the world in everywhere, she had never done that, and never would, preferring a life of her own.
Because he had changed so completely, he was in no danger at work. But she had loyalties she wouldn’t betray, and she knew that, tenure or not, she might not last long, perhaps not even until retirement, although having seen the quiet desperation of professors emeritus she wanted to work until she dropped. How could she communicate the reality of war and its effects – her field was twentieth-century France – without upsetting some Alice-in-Wonderland student who, having experienced nothing and been hypnotized into victimhood, would demand a trigger warning? It was a madhouse, made even more difficult for her in navigating the shoals of what was her second language after French, the third being a childhood Arabic fortified by some later study.
To her astonishment, she was forbidden to describe atrocities against white people or men. At first she thought this was a joke, but it wasn’t, and she quickly came to the realization that such a regime was merely a mechanism to give power to one or another struggling political faction in the highly infected, incestuous bloodstream of the university. She had been protected by her Arabic name. Her father was Algerian, as was her mother, but her mother, blonde and blue-eyed like Amina, was a French colon. What did these idiots, these self-appointed little commissars, who swerved from one angry lunacy to another almost daily, know of the mixture of blood, of race, existence, history, and love?
Despite her many transgressions against orthodoxy, Amina was in a sense paroled because she was an Arab and therefore in their view not white; and because she was a woman, an intellectual, and a foreigner. On the other hand, she was blonde and blue-eyed, magnificently dressed (she bought most of her clothes in Paris when she returned home), and elegant by nature, which screamed elitism and privilege, although she had never been privileged in the accurate or even the common and false understanding of the word. She was not confident that she would be able to work in the American university system much longer, as she was guilty of what had become its gravest sin: she thought and spoke freely.
Things began to clarify much faster than she had expected. In fact, they raced, and the afternoon was not even over.
RIDING INTO THE Arboretum at high speed was rather dangerous, because at lunch she had had too much to drink. Which is to say that she had twenty-five fluid ounces of Japanese beer, almost enough to put her under the table. She never drank, not because she was a Muslim – she hadn’t been devout even as a child in Algeria – but because she didn’t like it and didn’t need it. But after Sayyid had knocked the wind out of her when she came home from class at eleven, and walked out of the house with a German rucksack slung over his shoulder, never to return, she couldn’t stay a minute longer. So she got on her bicycle – she really loved her bicycle – and by accident found herself at a University Avenue Mexican restaurant called “The New Original Celia’s.”
It was a reincarnation, to the letter, of the previous establishment, and like its predecessor highly air-conditioned, welcome that day at noon in Indian Summer. She ordered a ceviche salad and a Kirin Ichiban, thinking that Ichiban meant “little.” It came in a huge glass mug that had been in the freezer probably since 1969, and was so cold that it almost anesthetized her. By the time she left the restaurant her head was spinning in the bright sunshine and, for the first time in her life, at age sixty-one, she was a drunk driver on a bicycle. This was dangerous, exhilarating, and the reason she went so fast and was so relaxed about doing so.
She was sufficiently unused to alcohol that she hoped the delirium would go away after she paid her check and went to brush her teeth – thirty seconds for each quadrant, faithfully as always. Everyone in California had – well, everyone in Palo Alto – glacially white teeth. So did she, although she could not compete with fluoridated youth whose smiles were as blinding as locomotive headlights. But then, locomotive headlights or not, they could not compete with the gentleness, wisdom, and warmth of her inimitable smile, preserved since childhood in all its innocence despite the infusion of a life’s-worth of strength and good graces. As she would note on the bench, the intoxication would take all afternoon to dissipate, it exaggerated her emotions, it filled her with love, longing, and regret, and it sped her decisions and made her recklessly and satisfyingly resolute.
In France, Sayyid had reminded her, men his age had mistresses. “Fuck you, Sayyid. You need another woman when you can’t even give me a child? And fuck them. I don’t care what they do in France. They’re greedy bastards who should be killed, every one of them. If I had someone on the side how would you feel? What if I took up with one of my graduate students, a young man of twenty-four who could father a child? How would you feel?”
“You can’t have a child, Amina,” was the reply.
“Not now, but I could have.”
“I have to go.”
“Yes, Sayyid, you have to go.”
When he actually walked out, not looking back, with a spring in his step, she knew it was really over. It was the lowest point, and she almost fainted. Then came the cycles, which, although she didn’t know it, were part of a spiral that would lead her to a new life. Even while at The New Original Celia’s she fell in love with a man, a handsome, professorial, quiet man who sat at a table by himself reading a medical journal. It was a heady feeling, and dangerous, soon exaggerated by the alcohol. She loved him, and saw him as her salvation. They would marry. He would be perfect. He would be divorced or a widower, and he would have wonderful, beautiful children, to whom she would be a substitute mother, and who would love her as much as she would love them.
But in an instant she understood that she was like a free radical that out of necessity and compulsion would dangerously bond with the first available atom, and she resolved not to, not to hop from one ice floe to another, but soberly – although she was sitting at the counter at The New Original Celia’s, increasingly not sober – to let time pass. Time did pass of course, and all afternoon she stayed on the bench, which was now so firmly her own that if anyone had tried to sit on it, even the Dalai Lama, she would have punched him.
When it began to cool, as it does in the evening all along the Peninsula even in summer, she found herself clearheaded and calm. She would accept her new status, live with her independence while neither glorifying nor regretting it, and, after a decent interval, keep her eyes open in the time she had left, refusing to discount the prospect of love. She had never been indecisive, and although modest she had always been courageous and she had always known her own mind.
The sun was setting, the fog beginning to roll down from the hills. The sky to the east and above was perfectly clear, dim, and almost golden. To the west, the fog bank descended, gray, moist, and white. Amina Belkacem, a most wonderful woman, who deserved to be loved, resolved to go back to France. California was in many respects a beautiful dream, but in France the beauty was awake and alert. France was her home, and there was a great deal to be said for going home.
With the sunset came the sound of a mourning dove somewhere in the trees. As in Algeria and as in France, it had waited for the tranquility that comes in heat or fading light. Its call was not a lament. Neither of happiness nor sadness, it rested perfectly upon the edge where these met, as if upon the ridge of a roof, superior to either, overlooking both, with the clearest sight and highest, most open view, which is that of acceptance. The cry of the mourning dove is beautiful because it wants nothing.
A Thousand Lawyers
HAD JULES BEEN jerked around in France from one end of the coun
try to another, he might have been resigned. A powerless semi-academic, he had been defeated even in infancy. Though in his youth he had had episodes of energy and luck, such flares had faded with age. In Paris, he might have simply bowed his head and let them work their ways with him.
But this was the New World. Floating on the jet stream, his plane roared toward the night in fearless confidence. The sun set across the plains, casting a deepening shadow until east of the Mississippi the land below was scattered with the sparkling of cities great and small. To the north, perhaps all the way into Canada, a continental storm front flashed with lightning as constant and surprising as raindrops bouncing on a lake.
The immense turbines spinning within the aircraft’s engines didn’t miss a beat. Like the heart, they had to be constant and reliable until the end. He could hardly explain whence his sudden energy and optimism came, but on the red-eye into New York he neither slept nor read. He felt that something from the vast substance of the ground over which he flew was penetrating him insubstantially. If a hundred invisible particles with strange names, and radio waves, cosmic rays, and magnetic fields were at any moment and without detection bathing him, everyone in the cabin, and indeed the whole world, with their unknown, mischievous, and mystical transits, who was to say that the land, air, and light over or through which he shot could not give strength where there was no strength, luck when luck had vanished, defiance in the face of defeat, and life where life had been running out?
He couldn’t have slept even had he wanted to. Running through him like an electric current was the empowering conviction that he himself did not need to live. It was Luc who needed to live. Without fear, Jules could take any chance. Understanding and accepting that he was expendable gave him strength as steady as the power that propelled the jet over one diamond-lit city after another glittering in a sea of black.