All Our Names (17 page)

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m going to be Isaac’s alarm clock.”

We had to avoid looking at each other to keep from laughing. Briefly, it felt like we were back at the university in the months before the protests, when our most pressing concern was how to keep our mock revolution going. Enough time hadn’t passed for us to be nostalgic, but there it was. That period in our lives was officially over, and if there was anything I wanted to toast, it was that.

Joseph squeezed our shoulders affectionately. “I have to sit,” he said. “My body has grown weary.”

He took a seat on the couch and had one of the guards bring him another beer. I imagined him feeling nostalgic for his own college days in London, which would have explained why he spoke like that.

“That’s how he talks when he’s been drinking,” Isaac said.

Before drinking again, Joseph crossed his legs and stretched his left arm over the cushions. He took a long look around the room—not at the people, but at the furniture and bare walls, the windows and door. He looked up at the ceiling and said in a voice just loud enough for Isaac and me to make out, “I hope I don’t blow myself up sitting here.”

I took the first exit off the highway, onto a narrow two-lane road, then drove for another half-mile or so before pulling over. I had expected some sort of shock to seize me, and had left the highway in anticipation of that, but now that we were on an unlit country road, I realized it wasn’t going to happen. There was no shock or surprise waiting: I had known all along that there was something fraudulent about the man sitting next to me; the only real surprise was how he came to tell me.

I left the engine on. I needed to feel like we were still moving.

“Do you want to tell me the rest?” I asked him.

He finally turned to me. It was almost pitch-black in the car, and the only thing I could see clearly was the outline of his nose and traces of his eyes.

“I can,” he said.

“But you would rather not?”

“I’m not sure how to answer that.”

I swung the car around and headed back to the highway, but I reached over and took his hand briefly in mine. He had lost
enough for one night; I didn’t want him to risk losing us as well, and there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t if he told me more.

“Where are we going?” he asked me.

“Wherever you want,” I said.

“Can we go somewhere and sleep? Without going back.”

I chose the first motel we came across, two exits away, on the outskirts of a town I had never heard of. I didn’t have the slightest fear that anyone I knew would see me, but Isaac insisted on sliding to the bottom of his seat as I pulled into the parking lot.

“Even if they don’t know you,” he said, “they still might not like what they see.”

I didn’t say it, but he was right. He understood this about America more intimately than I did.

The motel was half a city block long and two stories high. When I remember it, I think of it as being forcibly conscripted from some generic B-movie about a couple on the run, a place where transients and criminals go to hide.

I asked for a room on the ground floor, on the far end of the motel if possible. There were only two other cars in the parking lot, so both my wishes were granted. Our room number was 102—the exact number of students in my high-school graduating class. I took that as a good sign, and every time I returned to that motel, with Isaac, I always asked if room 102 was available. On almost every occasion, it was. The few times it wasn’t, I made sure to avoid seeing who came and went, or what noises were being made on the other side of the blue door, so I could hold on to the fantasy that the room was exclusively ours.

Isaac and I had the whole night ahead of us, and so, for once, we took our time. We kissed just on the other side of the door until our legs were tired, and then fell onto the bed; in another first, Isaac was the one to undress me. I had assumed that passion and speed were the same: the faster you flung and thrust, the more desire; maybe the difference between fucking and making love isn’t just a question of the heart but of the hands as well. Lovers fumble all the time—especially in winter, through all the layers. It’s a comedy of hands first, and then heads caught in sweaters and undershirts, and then shoes that stubbornly refuse to come off. If you can bear that with more than just an awkward grin, with a renewed desire, then a nearly vacant motel off the highway may feel like a sacred place at that moment, and for many years afterward.

We finished just as we had begun, unashamed and nearly laughing. We had left the lights on and could finally see each other with our eyes, not just our hands, and for what felt like hours all we did was stare at each other’s bodies.

“What were you thinking about,” Isaac asked me, “when you were sitting outside, watching my apartment? Did you think I had another woman? Another Helen who looked like you?”

I thought about what I could safely tell him. I looked him in the eyes; his grief was still with him. Unlike many men, Isaac was never a wall; he could only block so much. When he tried to hide his emotions, they leaked out on the sides. At his strongest, he was a cardboard box: it didn’t take much to figure out what was inside. That made it so much easier to forgive and love him, and when the time came, that much harder to let go.

“What was I thinking about?” I said. “Many things, and all of them were about you.”

What followed next was the start of a brief golden phase for Isaac and me, a winter and then a spring of long, almost nightly embraces, not cut short simply because it was after midnight. We called each other several times over the course of any given day, just to say what was obvious: that the night before had been marvelous, the days spent apart were too long, and there wasn’t an hour that passed when we didn’t think of each other. We spent the first weekend in December wrapped in blankets that we carried from the bed to the couch. Isaac said it reminded him of winters back home. “We love blankets in our family,” he said. “I think that’s one of the things I miss most. Seeing my mother or grandmother wrapped in a blanket anytime there was rain. They had blankets for winter and summer, and when I was little I’d try to hide under the blankets when they walked.”

I stood naked on his bed while he showed me how to wrap a blanket over my shoulders and around my neck so my arms were still free to flap around. I raised my hands over my head and looked in the mirror.

“You think I can fly?” I asked him.

“Of course,” he said.

I flapped my arms, then ran, jumped off the bed, and landed in his. I forced Isaac to turn around so I could see us together in the mirror.

“If you’re a bird,” I said, “then together we make a penguin.”

When my mother asked where I was spending my nights, I did my best to tell her the truth. “I’ve met someone,” I said.

I had come home early that morning and had hoped to leave before she woke up, but she knew my new routine and was waiting for me in the living room when I came downstairs with my coat already halfway on.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” she asked me. “Don’t you think I worry about you?”

She was troubled, hurt. It wasn’t a reproach, but I took it as one.

“You never asked,” I said.

“How can I, if I never see you? Who is this person?”

I pretended to struggle with the sleeves of my coat. What could I tell her? I didn’t know his real name, but I knew him to be a kind, decent man, none of which would matter if she knew where he was from. I wanted to spare us both the disappointment.

“I’m going to be late,” I said.

Though she wasn’t standing in my way, she stepped slightly to the side so I would know I was free to go. The last thing she said to me before I left was “This isn’t like you, Helen.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I know.”

We barely spoke for the next few weeks, and when we did, it was never about where I went or whom I spent my time with. She missed me; she let me know that in her own quiet way. She left a new dress on my bed, a necklace of hers that I had loved as a child, all while I was away from home. When we saw each other in the mornings, she told me about the water stains on the bathroom ceiling, the lunch she had had last week, and I said nothing about Isaac.

If it had only been Isaac and me, I’d like to think we could have gone on like that until the day he was supposed to leave; and it’s possible, if we had done so, that might have been enough so we could have tried to settle into a life together, maybe in one of those hippie enclaves in San Francisco, or in the chaos of a big city where no one’s interest in us ran that deep. Isaac and I spent New Year’s Eve drinking white wine in our motel room off the highway, and an entire Valentine Sunday in that room with a box of grocery-store heart-shaped chocolates and red and pink carnations. In April, it started raining hard a few days after Easter and didn’t stop until almost two weeks later, by which point half a
dozen towns along the river were covered in more than a foot of water. It was the type of natural disaster I would normally have wanted nothing to do with, given the scale and seemingly endless complications that came with it—from the vanished homes, to the devastated crops and factories forced to close—but when David asked if anyone wanted to go down and volunteer with another relief agency, I was the first to raise my hand. I thought I had lost the heart to take on that type of work, but I hadn’t. I had simply let the muscles go slack. What I didn’t know until then was that loving someone and feeling loved in return was the best exercise for the heart, the strength training needed to do more than simply make it through life. When I told Isaac I was going to work in the flooded towns that we had both seen on the news each night, he asked if the work wouldn’t be too difficult. He imagined me carrying sandbags along a levee. “Of course it will be hard,” I told him. I flexed both my arms. “Feel that,” I said. He squeezed my biceps. “You’re the strongest woman in the world,” he said, which was exactly how I felt when I was with him.

I spent most of that April touring water-soaked homes, one house and family at a time. There was a stillness to the destruction that I carried home at the end of each day—a chair turned upside down floating in a kitchen, or a woman standing with her hands on her hips, knee-deep in water, staring at the ruined remains of what had been her children’s bedroom. The rain and sandbagging had stopped days earlier, but the wreck remained, and it was in that wreckage that I found my place. Overnight, I became an agent of recovery. I waded in the mornings through drenched closets and chests of drawers, searching for important documents and mementos that could be salvaged, mainly for families who still didn’t have the heart to do so on their own. In the afternoons and evenings, I pored through stacks of government and insurance forms. I itemized lives, made lists and charts
of things lost, from cars, furniture, clothes, and homes to birth certificates, marriage licenses, deeds, wills, and mortgages. I loved what I did. I was hugged and cried on. I had the strength to endure others’ misery, to bear some of it on my own so they wouldn’t have to. Every time people told me, “I don’t know what to do next,” I held their hands and told them that was fine, they didn’t have to, because I did. I made the drive back to Isaac’s apartment three, sometimes four nights a week, on the days when I felt I needed him most. We took hour-long baths together.

“I’m starting to feel like a duck,” I told him. “I’m soaking wet all day, and then I come here to sit in a bath.”

When he opened the door in the evenings, the first thing I said to him was “Quack.” Most evenings I was too tired to talk for long, so he read to me in bed until I fell asleep—never from the same book twice, since most books he finished in a single day. “How do you choose what you’re going to read next?” I asked him.

“Simple,” he said. “I walk down an aisle, close my eyes, and run my hand along the spines. Whatever book is there when I stop is what I read next.”

I believed him at first, but then I saw the university course catalogue lying on the floor next to his bed. He had circled dozens of courses in different departments and was slowly making his way through the partial reading list that was listed next to each class. That was my Isaac at his best.

It was into that private world of ours that Henry stepped in. May was mercifully dry: eighteen straight days of brilliant sunshine, never too warm or humid. I went back to my office at the start of the month, when the bulldozers and construction crews arrived, convinced that, other than the five people who had drowned,
nothing had been lost in all that water that could not be replaced. I had done a decent job until then of not counting the months that I had left with Isaac, but the change in season and weather and the return to office life had been so abrupt that all I could see was the end of summer. I skipped over June and July and went straight to the second week in August, when Isaac’s visa was set to expire.

“We’re running out of time,” I told him.

“Let’s try not to think about that,” he said.

“And how do we do that? You’re going to be gone soon, and I still don’t know what I’m going to be left with.” Which I suppose was my way of saying I was done with mystery; its charm had worn thin. What I wanted was a real person to hold on to and eventually miss.

He put his arm around me. “I’m not gone yet,” he said, and with that I relented. A week later, Isaac called me at work to tell me he wanted us to have dinner with Henry, the only friend he had, other than me, in America. Of course, he was far more generous in describing him. His exact words were, “He’s the closest thing I have to a past in this country.”

Isaac claimed that he was the one who invited Henry to join us for dinner, but I’m certain that wasn’t true. Henry was never Isaac’s guest; if anything, Isaac was always his. The barrel-chested, balding, middle-aged man whose shadow I first saw from my car was the same person who had helped bring Isaac to America, the old friend of David’s who had secured his visa and had him placed in our care. No, I don’t believe Isaac invited Henry to dinner so he could meet me. He invited Henry to dinner because Henry wanted to know who the woman lurking outside of the apartment was.