Await Your Reply (27 page)

G
eorge Orson was losing his cool.

He’d wake up in the middle of the night with a thrashing cry, and then he would sit with his knees pulled up, with the bedside lamp on and the television going. “I’m having bad dreams again,” he said, and Lucy sat there uncomfortably beside him as he emanated a long, barren silence.

It was their second day in Africa, holed up in a fifteenth-floor room at the Hotel Ivoire, and George Orson would go out and come back, go out and come back, and each time he returned, he looked more flushed and unnerved.

Meanwhile, Lucy had been sitting there in their room, high in the spire of a skyscraper hotel, bored and pretty freaked out herself, delicately un-taping currency from the pages of books, staring down at the stream of traffic on the highway below. Six lanes of cars, running the circumference of the Ébrié Lagoon—which was not the azure brochure blue she had expected, but just ordinary grayish water, not much different from Lake Erie. At least there were palm trees.

She heard him at the door, rattling the knob, muttering to himself, and when he finally burst in, he threw his key card onto the carpet, his teeth bared.

“Motherfucker,” he said, and hurled his briefcase onto the bed. “God-fucking-damn it,” he said, and Lucy stood there, holding a hundred-dollar bill, blinking at him, alarmed. She had never heard him swear before.

“What’s wrong?” she said, and she watched as he stomped over to the minibar and yanked it open.

Empty.

“Fucking piece-of-shit hotel,” he said. “This is supposed to be four stars?”

“What’s wrong?” she said again, but he merely shook his head at her, irritably, passing his fingers across his scalp, his hair standing up in dry, grassy tufts.

“We’re going to get new passports,” he said. “We need to get rid of David and Brooke as quickly as possible.”

“Fine with me,” she said, and she watched as he went to the phone on the desk and lifted the receiver from its cradle with a flourish of controlled fury.

“Allô, allô?” he
said. He took a breath, and it was uncanny, she thought. His face actually seemed to change as he adopted his deep, exaggerated French accent. His eyelids drooped a bit, and his mouth turned down and he lifted his chin.

“Service des chambres?
” he said.
“S’il vous plaît, je voudrais une bouteille de whiskey. Oui. Jameson, s’il vous plaît.
”

“George,” she said—forgetting herself again, forgetting that he was “Dad.” “Is there a problem?” she said, but he only held up one finger:
Hush
.

“Oui,” he
said into the phone.
“Chambre quinze quarante-et-un,
” he said, and then, only after he had set the phone down, did he turn to look at her.

“What’s going on?” she said. “Is there a problem?”

“I need a drink; that’s the main problem,” he said, and he sat
down on the bed and took off his shoe. “But if you want to know the truth, I’m feeling just a touch worried, and I’d like to get us some new names. Tomorrow.”

“Okay,” she said. She set
Bleak House
down on the coffee table and discreetly put the hundred-dollar bill into the front pocket of her jeans. “But that doesn’t answer my question. What’s going on?”

“Everything’s fine,” he said, shortly. “I’m just being paranoid,” he said, and dropped his other shoe onto the floor. One of those men’s slip-on loafers, with leather tassels where the laces should be.

“I want you to go down to the salon downstairs tomorrow morning,” he said. “See if they can make you a blonde. And get it cut,” he said—and she imagined that there was just a slight edge of distaste in his voice. “Something sophisticated. They should be able to manage that.”

Lucy put her hand to her hair. She hadn’t yet undone her Brooke Fremden braids, though she hated them. Too childish, she’d said. “Am I supposed to be sixteen? Or eight?” she’d said, though ultimately she had let herself be talked into it, when George Orson insisted.

I never wanted this hair in the first place
. That’s what she wanted to remind him, but it probably didn’t matter. He had taken his palm-size notebook from the pocket of his suit jacket, writing in his fussy, tiny block letters.

“So you’ll get your hair done first thing in the morning,” he was saying. “We’ll get the pictures taken before noon, and we can hopefully have the new passports done for us by Wednesday morning. We’ll move to a new hotel by Wednesday afternoon. It would be good if we could get out of the country as soon as possible. I’d like to be in Rome by Saturday, at the latest.”

She nodded, staring down at the carpet, which was spotted with the indentations of small black cigarette burns. The remnant of an old piece of gum, worn as flat as a coin. Unremovable, apparently.

“Okay,” she said, though now she was feeling nervous as well.
She had not been out of the hotel room without George Orson, and the idea of the hair salon was suddenly daunting.
I’m just being paranoid
, he’d said, but she was sure he was anxious for a good reason, even if he wouldn’t admit it.

It would be scary, she thought, going out into the public areas of the hotel, all by herself.

Everyone was black, that was one thing. She would be conscious of being a white girl, she would be visible in a way that she wasn’t used to, there would be no crowd to vanish into, and she thought of the times that she and her family had driven through the black parts of Youngstown, how it had felt like the people on the street, the people waiting at the bus stops, had lifted their eyes to stare. As if their old four-door sedan were trailing an aura of Caucasian-ness, as if it were lit with phosphorescence. She remembered how her mother would press the automatic lock buttons on the car door, testing and retesting them.

“This is a bad neighborhood, girls,” their mother said, and Lucy had rolled her eyes.
How racist
, she thought, and made a point of lifting the lock on her own door.

This, of course, was different. It was Africa. It was a third world country, a place of coup attempts and armed uprisings and child soldiers, and she had read the State Department advisory:
Americans should avoid crowds and demonstrations, be aware of their surroundings, and use common sense to avoid situations and locations that could be dangerous. Given the strong anti-French sentiment, people of non-African appearance may be specifically targeted for violence
.

But she didn’t want to be a coward, either, and so she simply stood, watching as George Orson took off his socks and massaged the ball of his bare foot with his thumb.

“Will they speak English?” she said at last, hesitantly. “At the hair salon? What if they don’t speak English?”

And George Orson looked up at her sternly. “I’m sure they’ll have someone there who speaks English,” he said. “Besides which—Darling, you’ve had three years of high school French, which
should be quite sufficient. Do you need me to write some phrases down for you?”

“No,” Lucy said, and she shrugged. “No—I guess I’m … I’m fine,” she said.

But George Orson exhaled irritably. “Listen,” he said. “Lucy,” he said, and she could tell that he was using her true name deliberately, to make a point. “You’re not a kid. You’re an adult. And you’re a very smart person, I’ve always told you that. I saw that about Lucy right away; she was a remarkable young woman.

“And now,” he said. “Now you just need to be a little more assertive. Are you going to spend the rest of your life waiting for someone to tell you what to do, every step of the way? I mean, Jesus Christ, Lucy! You go down to the lobby, you speak English, or you patch together some pidgin French, or you communicate through sign language, and I’ll bet you can manage to get your hair done without someone holding your hand through the process.”

He put up his arms and fell back onto the bed with a private sotto voce huff of frustration, as if there were an audience out there watching them, as if there were someone else he was commiserating with.
Can you believe I have to deal with this?

She wished she could think of some icy, cutting retort.

But she couldn’t think of anything. Speechless: to be talked to in this way, after all of his lies and evasions, after all that time she spent in the Lighthouse Motel, waiting patiently and faithfully, to hear now that she wasn’t “assertive”?

“I need a drink,” George Orson murmured moodily, and Lucy just stood there, gazing down at him. Then, at last, she turned back to her book, to
Bleak House
, sitting down as with a sweater she was knitting and slowly unfastening the taped bills, observing as the transparent adhesive pulled the letters off of the old pages.

So she would be assertive, she thought.

She was a world traveler, after all. In the past week, she had been
to two continents—albeit only a few hours in Europe, in Brussels—but soon she would be living in Rome. She was going to be
cosmopolitan
, wasn’t that what George Orson had told her, all those months ago, as they drove away from Pompey, Ohio? Wasn’t that what she had dreamed of?

This was not exactly Monaco or the Bahamas or one of the Mexican resorts on the Riviera Maya she used to swoon over on the Internet. But he was right, she thought. It was an opportunity for her to be an adult.

So when he left that morning, promising that he’d be back before noon, she’d steeled herself.

She dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, an outfit that, while not exactly mature, was at least neutral. She brushed out her hair, and found the tube of lipstick she’d bought back when they were driving cross-country in the Maserati. There it was, barely used, still in a zippered pocket of her purse.

She put five hundred dollars into her purse as well, and the rest of the money she wrapped in a dirty T-shirt at the bottom of the cheap, girly Brooke Fremden backpack George Orson had bought her back in Nebraska.

Okay, she thought. She was doing this.

And she boarded the elevator, coolly and confidently, and when a man entered on the next floor—a soldier, in camouflage and a blue beret, red epaulets on his shoulders—she kept her face entirely expressionless, as if she hadn’t even noticed, as if she weren’t aware that he was gazing at her with steadfast disapproval and there was a pistol holstered at his waist.

She rode down all the rest of the way, alone with him in silence, and when he held the elevator door and made a gentlemanly gesture
—ladies first—
she murmured
“Merci,
” and stepped into the lobby.

She was really doing this, she thought.

It took a long time to get her hair done, but it was actually easier than she’d thought. She was frightened when she first went into the salon, which was empty except for the two employees—a thin, haughty, Mediterranean-looking woman, who looked as if she were examining Lucy’s T-shirt and jeans with revulsion; and an African woman who regarded her more mildly.

“Excusez-moi,”Lucy
said, stiffly.
“Parlez-vous anglais?
”

She was aware of how clumsy she sounded, even though she enunciated as best she could. She remembered how, back in high school French, Mme Fournier would grimace with pity as Lucy tried to bumble her way through a conversational prompt. “Oh!” Mme Fournier would say. “
Ça fait mal aux oreilles!
”

But Lucy could say a simple phrase, couldn’t she? It wasn’t that hard, was it? She could make herself understood.

And it was okay. The African woman nodded at her politely. “Yes, mademoiselle,” she said. “I speak English.”

The woman was actually quite friendly. Though she tsked over the dye in Lucy’s hair—“terrible,” she murmured—she nevertheless believed she could do something with it. “I will do my best for you,” she told Lucy.

The woman’s name was Stephanie, and she was from Ghana, she said, though she had lived in Côte d’Ivoire for many years now. “Ghana is an English-speaking country. That is my native language,” Stephanie said. “So it’s pleasant to speak English sometimes. That’s one characteristic with the Ivorians I don’t understand. They turn to laugh at a foreigner who makes a mistake in French, so even when they know a little English, they refuse to speak. Why? Because they think the Anglophones will laugh at them in turn!” And she lowered her voice as she began to work her rubber-gloved fingers through Lucy’s hair. “That is the problem with Zaina. My coworker. She has a good heart, but she is a Lebanese, and they are very proud. All the time, they are worried about their dignity.”

“Yes,” Lucy said, and she closed her eyes. How long it had been since she had talked to anyone besides George Orson! It had
been—what?—months and months, and she almost hadn’t realized until just now how lonely she had been. She’d never had many friends, she’d never particularly liked the company of other girls at her high school, but now, as Stephanie’s fingernails drew soft lines across her scalp, she saw that this had been a mistake. She had been like Zaina—too proud, too concerned with her own dignity.

“I’m so happy to see that tourists are coming back to Abidjan,” Stephanie was telling her. “After the war, after all the French fled, the other countries would all say, ‘Do not travel to Côte d’Ivoire, it is too dangerous,’ and it made me sad. Once, Abidjan was known as the Paris of West Africa. Did you know that? This hotel, if you could have seen it fifteen years ago, when I first came to this country! There was a casino. An ice-skating rink, the only one in West Africa! The hotel was a jewel, and then it began to fall into disrepair. Did you see that once there was a pool that surrounded the whole building, a beautiful pool, but now there is no water in it. For a while, I would come to work and there were so few guests that I imagined that I was in an old, empty castle, in some cold country.