A Life in Men: A Novel (53 page)

T
HE MORNING THE
American girl arrived at his door he had decided not to play the piano. He was twenty-four years old and enough was enough. He had just started the final year of his master’s degree in engineering, and as soon as he graduated he would marry his longtime girlfriend. Some of his English friends liked to ask if it was an arranged marriage, but of course that was not the case. True, they had known each other since childhood, and their parents were friends, but it had been their choice to date. Neither had even
been
to India. London was both their home and a place where they would forever be aliens, but in this experience, too, they were not alone, for London contains a sea of isolated exiles. After marriage they would be exiles together, but their children, second-generation Brits, would not.

The day the American girl showed up at his door, he had chosen not to play. For many years his dream had been to become a concert pianist, and even after relinquishing that possibility (without really pursuing it), he’d thought of music as the thing that sustained him. But that was foolishness now. No, his music was merely a
hobby
, and one did not adhere to hobbies with ritual and obsession; one did not need to play at the same exact time every day, the moment his parents left the flat for the restaurant, the moment he was alone, or with only Ali, since being with one’s twin is no different from being alone. Ali didn’t care for the lessons their father had imposed—he had no ear for music and less interest. His mother said Hasnain played well, but she, too, had little use for hours spent sitting at a piano, playing, as she called it, “the dead masters of colonialism.”

It was late September 1988. The weather had already gone cold. These were the dark months when the music mattered to him most, and it was his being drawn to it that stilled his hands that morning, made him sit down with a textbook to study instead. A small decision: the piano could wait. A small choice, like what to have for tea, like which umbrella to bring. Small and without consequence, Hasnain sat, an alienated exile in a sea of alienated exiles: an ordinary man absorbed in an engineering textbook.

The pounding on the door was hard, staccato. The way someone would bang if the building were on fire, to warn you to get out.

He thought briefly of not answering. Only a religious fanatic aiming to convert you was likely to be pounding on the door on a rainy September morning. Besides, not answering the door would confirm the picture of himself in his mind as a man absorbed in his studies, not thinking about the piano. Yet he found himself standing, leaving that fantasy at the kitchen table with his book. He found himself walking down the stairs to open the door.

I
N THE CHURCH
basement, old Canadian ladies and high school students ladle soup into bowls, pass out sandwiches. The entire town has mobilized. Gander has only ten thousand residents, and there are rumored to be more than six thousand air passengers now grounded here, scattered among schools and churches and meeting halls and lodges. Sleeping bags and cots have been gathered. At the front of the room a television plays, continuously showing footage of the Twin Towers falling down. Some people are crying and others are standing round chatting and munching on snacks as though this is an after-church social. Phone calls are still being made, but if anyone here has lost a loved one, the Canadians must have chauffeured the bereaved off quickly to a private home. Instead, the energy in the air makes it feel like some combination of a funeral, a group therapy session for those with secondary post-traumatic stress syndrome, and a cruise. Hasnain, a.k.a. John, sits on a metal folding chair with a ham sandwich on his lap. In this context, the ham, too, seems ironic, though of course he eats pork—he eats whatever Leslie cooks for him, is lazy about food and always has been. She asked when they first got together if there were things she should avoid, but he said not to be silly, even in London he ate what he liked so long as his parents weren’t looking. “Then why don’t you drink?” she asks—has asked at least seven or eight times in their marriage. “If the dietary restrictions don’t mean anything to you, why won’t you have a glass of wine with me?” Hasnain has no good reason, always says only, “I just don’t like the taste.”

He pushes his food around on his paper plate. The sandwich contains an excessive amount of mayonnaise.

L
ESLIE ANSWERED THE
phone with a gasp in her voice. She heard his voice and began to cry, voice trembling as she said, “I would die if anything happened to you, I would die, Hasnain,” so that he had to blink the tears from his own eyes, even though many of his fellow stranded Americans were weeping openly.

But now he thinks: she would
not
die. She might want to, maybe, but probably not even that. There are the boys to consider. She would go on—she is only thirty-nine—would probably even marry again someday, another man she would clutch in the night in her aerobicized, passionate arms, another man his sons would call Dad instead of Baba. This knowledge of love’s transience is not the death of romance exactly, but certainly it is its foe. Every fevered moment of a young man unable to get past security at Heathrow and blindly shouting out the name of his beloved—every weeping declaration of the power to die at will—is both measly and powerful in tandem, and he receives Leslie’s words, trying to honor her intentions, trying not to cast himself as wiser somehow just because his own staying power proved so slim.

P
EOPLE CRY, EAT,
play cards, or watch TV. All around him, life goes on.

“Hasnain!”

It is a woman’s voice. At first he does not think she means
him
. He is not in New York. No one here knows his given name.

“Hasnain! My God, someone I know, someone from home in the middle of this nightmare!” And the woman throws her arms around him, pulls back, blinking wildly, taking him in, hungry for something familiar, for recognition.

It is Rebecca Fishman. He used to teach her daughter Susan, who must be ten or eleven now. Susan still plays piano, but she’s working with another teacher at the institute now. “Rebecca,” he says, standing. “Have you been able to reach your family?”

She starts to cry. She sobs into his shoulder, nodding. “Yes, yes, they’re fine. Alan didn’t go to work today—can you believe it? He works from home a lot now and he said he was going in—he made me find someone else to pick Susan up from school and everything—but in the end he stayed home. His office is only a block away from the towers, who knows what would have happened?” She sniffs, wipes her nose, he believes, on his shoulder unconsciously. “What about your wife and sons?”

“They’re fine,” Hasnain assures her. “Safely in Brooklyn.” He tries to smile. “Finally, an advantage to not being able to afford housing in Manhattan.”

She laughs, almost deliriously. She clutches his arm.

“I just—” she begins, falters, glances around the room like a caged animal. “I just want to see my daughter’s face . . .”

“Come on,” he says, steering her toward the door. “I hear it’s a beautiful town out there. Let’s go and have a look around.”

H
E IS AWARE
that he is thinking less of Rebecca and her tears than his own longing to leave this church—of Rebecca’s blond hair and fair American skin serving as his bodyguard. He is aware that, while all around him is nothing but small-town hospitality, he has not yet given up a nagging suspicion that he will be killed before he can make it back to New York. He is aware that in some far-off corner of his mind he is relieved he married a white, Christian woman, because if his wife were dark skinned he would be ripping out his own hair in anxiety right now, fearing that, home in New York, she would be dragged away and lynched by a crowd. He is aware that somehow he has come to equate paleness with safety even though the majority of people killed yesterday were probably white, and even though Nicole’s skin was virtually translucent and she, too, is dead.

O
N THE STAIRS
outside his door—his parents’ door—stood the American girl from the restaurant. Hasnain recognized her immediately: she came in a few times a week and ordered dry vegetable curry, always take-out. She usually waited for her order by the door, pacing and skittish and always wearing the same black sweater that was no protection from the rain or wind. Sometimes her yellow hair was wet. Hasnain had spoken to her; he took her order sometimes and delivered it back to her waiting, shaking hands. Most of the American girls this age who lived in London were students, yet this girl did not seem like a student. She was striking, but in a raw, desperate way. He thought she lived on his street but didn’t know which flat. He suspected she was on drugs.

She stood on his steps. She was wiping her eyes with the back of her knuckles, the motion almost aggressive. He thought for a moment that she must have been attacked, had dashed up the first set of stairs for help, though he saw no assailant. She stood blinking at him and he had the sensation—familiar when among English girls and, he supposed, American girls, too, though he did not know many of the latter—that she recognized him not at all: that she had never really noticed him in the first place, had looked right through his face as though he were a ghost.

She said tentatively, “Are you the piano player?”

He did not know how to answer. Ali was gone, already in class. Hasnain stepped aside in the doorway. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Do you need to come inside?”

She said again, “Are you the one who plays the piano every morning? You play, every morning at nine thirty sharp, right? Why aren’t you playing today?”

It had to be a dream.
She
was the ghost, then—her pale, haunted face an apparition. It was as though his music—or its lack—had conjured her.

As though anybody
real
possibly cared.

They stood together in his foyer. The morning was gray but dry, and her long hair seemed full of static. She reached out her arm and Hasnain felt himself recoil slightly, as though she meant to strike him, but instead when she touched him he caught a fleeting glimpse of thin razor marks along her forearm as the loose sleeve of her sweater fell open. But there was no blood on her hand: the cuts must have been old. She chewed her lip. Kohl was smudged under her eyes as though from the night before. She looked terribly young, but he suspected she was not as young as all that. He knew he should call his mother or fiancée—some woman who would know what to do.

“I told myself,” she said in that American twang he had never cared for, “that on the first day you didn’t play, I would take it as a sign. But I don’t want to die today, so I came over instead to see if you would buy me another day. Now.”

The day I found out began as a “good day.” When I first got here, there were still times I could act normally, conscious of playing a part but confident in my ability to pass undetected. That morning I’d felt strong enough to go to my Women in Literature class, thinking in my idiocy that it might help. A student in the class, English with a fancy English name, has hair like yours, and for the first half of class I sat watching her wind it round and round her fingers, tucking it into the back of her turtleneck sweater, which was too warm for the weather, and I felt for the first time since leaving you in Athens the sharp longing to talk to another girl. I fantasized that she could become my new best friend and I could tell her all the things I’d had to keep from you, and she would be strong enough to bear them. They were discussing Jean Rhys and I’d been staring at the nape of the not-you girl’s neck, when suddenly I realized the class discussion was about rape. They were all quite animated, giving their views. “I would rather be murdered than raped,” the turtleneck girl proclaimed proudly, and a fat girl began to protest but the turtleneck girl was strident and overtook her, saying, “At least I could die with dignity, I could die without someone
else having control over me.” The fat girl was so flustered it became immediately clear that the turtleneck girl was saying
that
girl would be better off dead than living in her own violated skin, and I thought about you and what I had told myself that day. That anything is preferable to death because only death is irrevocable, only death is a condition that cannot be healed. But I didn’t trust that anymore, so I walked out of the classroom. That was the day I almost fainted twice on the Tube, even though I’d felt strong enough that morning to eat breakfast and hadn’t thrown up the way I usually did. That was the day I finally took the test, because of course, like everything else, by the time I faced the situation enough to act, I already knew the truth.

T
O BE CLEAR:
he could have sent the letters to her family. She left him the Ohio address of her mother, who surely would know the friend for whom they were intended. But Nicole’s mother knew nothing of the rape, nothing, even, of Hasnain’s existence, so the move seemed potentially cruel. Plus, her family owned her death: her mother must have claimed her body, presided over her burial. From all that, he was excluded.
This,
these letters, is all he has left of her and it is his. He could have sent the letters back but didn’t, because they meant more to him than he could ever imagine them meaning to anyone else.

T
HE TOWN IS
what Leslie would call “darling.” Hasnain and Rebecca walk quietly, staring out at the rocky water. The landscape reminds Hasnain, actually, of seaside English towns. The weather is crisp, air full of invisible wetness that feels thick in his mouth. When Rebecca is quiet like this, he can almost pretend he is back in England, he and Ali on holiday collecting rocks their mother would of course never allow them to bring home. He can pretend that he and Leslie have taken the boys to Cape Cod, to a world full of white-shingled beach houses and reeds blowing in the wind and violent waters that belie a world of peace.

There will never be a world of peace again.