Dreams of Bread and Fire (28 page)

This seemed to Ani like the moment to unburden herself—to tell the sorry tale of her failed love affair with Van Ardavanian—but she couldn’t bear the scalding light of Elena’s anthropological curiosity. And, more importantly, she had pledged silence.

Ani asked, “Does it seem to you that almost everyone on campus is wearing black? It’s like they’re all on their way to a wake.”

“Black’s in fashion,” Elena responded. She was wearing black jeans and a black sweater.

“But what is the fashion about? What’s behind it? I think it’s a generation in mourning,” Ani observed.

“In mourning for what?” Elena asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. The demise of the planet. The threat of nuclear war. The end of love.”

“You
are
depressed,” Elena stated, as they stood to exit the train.

They walked along the narrow tree-lined street past brick townhouses.

Elena said, “You know, you can go to the student health service and talk to a shrink for free. Then they refer you to another shrink for treatment. The one I’m seeing now has a sliding scale. It’s almost affordable.”

As she listened, Ani noticed Elena making eye contact with a woman who passed them on the sidewalk.

“You’re seeing a therapist?” Ani asked.

“Oh, my God, Ani, everyone I know in New York has a shrink,” Elena replied.

Ani watched as two older women with matching leather jackets went by. When Elena raised her eyebrows at them, they smiled in return.

“Why do you do that?” Ani asked.

“Do what?” Elena said.

“Make weird faces at women on the street.”

Elena laughed. “It’s a secret signal we use to acknowledge members of our tribe.”

While Ani wasn’t interested in joining this particular tribe, belonging to one sounded like a good idea. There were millions of people in the city. Someone had told Ani that if everyone in Manhattan came out of their apartments at the same time there wouldn’t be enough room on the sidewalks for all of them. Yet Ani had only one friend and twelve acquaintances. When Elena stayed at Daisy’s over the weekend, Ani might go for two days without having a meaningful conversation.

Daisy’s second-floor apartment had five spacious rooms with tall windows. Daisy, who was dressed in a black cashmere sweater and black jeans, gave Ani the tour. There were matching dishes and a complete set of flatware in the gleaming kitchen. Daisy’s bedroom featured a queen-sized bed with a brass headboard.

Daisy gestured at the other bedroom door. “That’s Jackie’s room. She’s a slob, so we keep the door closed.”

“Wow,” Ani said. “You’ve arrived. This is real life. Our furniture is all stuff that Elena dragged home on trash day.”

“That’s because Daisy has a job and brings home real money,” Elena said, ruffling Daisy’s cropped blond hair.

While Daisy was in the kitchen, Ani and Elena set the dining room table for four.

“Who’s Jackie?” Ani asked.

“The ex,” Elena said curtly.

“Her ex-girlfriend lives here?” Ani asked incredulously.

“Listen, Ani, we’re all grown-ups now.”

Ani couldn’t imagine giving that kind of leeway to a recently split heterosexual couple.

Jackie breezed in as they were carrying serving platters to the dining room. She had a pretty oval face, short black hair, and there was a silver ring through her right eyebrow. She too was wearing a black sweater and black jeans.

“Jackie, this is Ani,” Daisy said.

“Hey, Ani, are you my date for the evening?” Jackie winked at Ani.

Ani tried to keep her face immobile but felt the flush creeping up her neck.

“You slut,” Daisy said.

When Daisy and Elena laughed, Ani realized it was all in jest and she smiled stiffly.

Ani took the subway home alone, surprised to find the car almost full at midnight. Two Polish carpenters with their tools in canvas bags sat next to Ani. Across the way was an older black woman wearing a nurse’s aide uniform and reading a copy of the
Watchtower.
At Times Square a ragged white man with a matted beard and dirt in the creases of his face entered the car and started shouting at his fellow passengers as the train hurtled through the dark.

He yelled, “Cesspools, you’re all fucking cesspools. Do you understand that? Not a grain of decency in a single one of you. Like fucking animals. Do you hear me? Fucking animals, all of you.”

When she stepped onto the platform at her station, Ani felt the knot behind her forehead loosen slightly. She walked across the campus, past the gleaming facades of the neoclassical buildings. The moon sat in the satin sky like a crooked bowl. God ladled sadness into the bowl until it spilled from the heavens like bitter milk. Ani caught the milk in her cup and drank it down.

Where was Van? She wished she had pierced his nose with a golden ring and threaded a silken cord through it. She could lead him around like a prized calf. Except maybe the ring should be through the heart. Her heart had been ground to a fine meat that could be mixed in a bowl with onions and parsley for baking onto a
lahmejun.
Love was at its core a kind of cannibalism.

The next morning Ani went to the Armenian language class she had signed up for, despite the fact that it had no relation to the degree she was meant to be taking. The class met four times a week and was led by a thin bearded graduate student from Beirut named Zaven. The four women students all spoke some Armenian, and the other three already knew the alphabet, so Ani would have to work hard to keep up.

That afternoon Ani skipped a lecture sponsored by the French department and sat in instead on an Armenian history seminar. In the departmental office, Ani slid into a seat at a carved mahogany table with twelve students around it.

Professor Avedikian, who was short and portly with iron-gray hair and a white goatee, strode in and took his place at the head of the table. He lectured for two straight hours, speaking deliberately in impeccable English with a slight hint of an Armenian accent. As the minutes went by he slowly turned the yellowed leaves of his notes without once appearing to consult them.

After the lecture Ani headed to the student health service for a consultation. The therapist was a tall woman with frizzy shoulder-length brown hair and a row of silver bangles up one of her forearms.

“What brings you here?” she asked, her long face calm and expectant.

Ani twirled a lock of hair at the nape of her neck. “Well, people keep asking me if I’m depressed, so I started thinking maybe I’m depressed.”

“About anything in particular?”

“I’m kind of unhappy.”

“And what do you think is the cause of your unhappiness?”

Ani blurted out, “I have no idea what I’m doing. My best friend has joined a lesbian secret society. My college boyfriend dumped me like last night’s table scraps. The next boyfriend was a childhood buddy, practically a cousin, who lied to me about almost everything and then disappeared. The Turks tried to wipe out my grandparents and the rest of the Armenians like they were so many cockroaches, and did a damned good job. My father was killed by a hit-and-run driver about a block from here when I was four years old. His family had disowned him when he married my mother and I’ve never met any of them, including an aunt who probably still lives on West End Avenue.”

Ani observed the therapist’s eyebrows rise into two peaks while the rest of her face remained impassive. “You sound angry,” the woman said evenly.

“I’m not angry!” Ani shouted. “I’m depressed.”

thorns are pulled out one by one

Ani called her mother to ask for money. She needed help paying for the course of reduced-fee analysis she had agreed to with Dr. Levin, the woman to whom Ani had been referred by the health service therapist.

Violet responded with concern. “Therapy? Four times a week? I told you that you were depressed. Can’t you just forget about that heel? You’re too good for him anyway. I don’t like the idea of you all alone in that big city when you’re feeling depressed. You’re not thinking of doing anything crazy, are you? Should I come down and get you?”

“Mom, it’s totally normal to see a therapist in New York. It doesn’t mean you’re crazy. Elena’s seeing one. I bet half the French department is seeing somebody,” Ani assured her.

Violet went into stage two of her response. “So this is some graduate student fad? You think I should send you my hard-earned money so you can be part of a fashion trend?”

Ani took to the process quickly. After a few weeks of lying on the beige couch, the white room had become a mountain kingdom isolated from the rest of the world. Ani was the empress of the country and Dr. Levin its religious leader. Ani could say almost anything that came into her head and her secrets would not escape their national boundaries.

But Ani didn’t mention the bombing in Brussels. She had thus far kept the details of Van’s political engagement extremely vague. But how was she supposed to keep her promise to him and let herself “free-associate” at the same time?

On Sunday afternoon, Ani was alone in the apartment with her stacks of books and articles. She found herself thinking about her father, who had emerged in her therapy sessions more as an atmosphere than a person. Without quite articulating to herself what she was doing, Ani went outside, walked around the block to the building where she had lived the first four years of her life, and rang a specific buzzer.

“Hello?” an older woman’s voice said over the intercom.

“Hi. My name is Ani. I’m sorry to bother you. I used to live in your apartment when I was small, and I was wondering if I could come up and take a peek around.”

Miraculously, the woman buzzed her in.

On the third floor a white-haired woman with watery blue eyes peered out from her door. “I’m Rosemary Brennan. Why don’t you come in, dear.”

Ani followed her down a long hall with bedrooms and a bathroom on the right and black and white checked tiles on the floor. She suddenly saw the wheels of a red tricycle going over the checked floor. Her red tricycle. Her dad was behind her, with his foot on the trike’s back step and his hands next to hers on the silver handlebars. There were red and white plastic streamers at the end of each handle grip.

“Why don’t you sit down,” Mrs. Brennan said.

“Thanks,” Ani said, taking a wing chair next to a window overlooking Morningside Park.

Ani saw her father sitting back in a deep blue armchair blowing smoke rings out the window. He looked up at her and smiled before fading away.

“When did you live here?” Mrs. Brennan asked. Her face was fair and narrow with deep smile lines. Her head trembled slightly as she talked.

“We left in August of 1965,” Ani said.

Ani stood on the sidewalk scuffing the rubber toes of her blue sneakers while Baba put the suitcases in the back of the car. It was a hot day and there were rings of sweat under the arms of Baba’s work shirt. Grandma sat on the stoop fanning herself with a section of the newspaper.

“We moved here in October of the same year,” Mrs. Brennan said.

“I remember the floor tiles in the hall,” Ani said.

“Yes, we replaced them about five years ago with the same thing that was here when we arrived.”

“My father was killed by a hit-and-run driver.”

Ani had never seen the body, which seemed like a merciful thing to spare a child, although it left her with the impression that he had walked out the door and vanished into the cityscape.

Mrs. Brennan said, “We heard about that from the neighbors. Six years later our son was shot on the corner of Morningside and 120th Street during a robbery. You never get over something like that, do you?”

“How old was he?” Ani asked.

She immediately regretted having asked the question. Would it be better or worse if Mrs. Brennan answered ten or twenty? Ten would be worse, because then the mother could never forgive herself for allowing her child outside.

“Nineteen. The police never solved the case.”

“I’m so sorry.”

The words hung on the air for a moment, wan and useless.

“Yes, well, I have another son. That’s something to be thankful for,” Mrs. Brennan said.

Ani used the bathroom on her way out. She stood at the sink running warm water over her hands and staring in the mirror. When she shut her eyes she heard the sound of water jostling in the sink as her father splashed his face. He applied the shaving cream to his cheeks like a white mask. The razor slowly unveiled his beloved face in long narrow strips. After the water had drained there were bits of white froth and tiny hairs in the basin. Her father leaned over to offer his freshly shaved face to her. It was smooth, damp, and warm under her palm.

In her apartment Ani lay on the lumpy couch staring through the barred window.

My soul is weary of my life; I will leave my complaint upon myself; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.

Strange the lines that came echoing back up the long halls of memory. Mrs. Duke, the Sunday school teacher, had listened to the Bible verses that Ani learned by heart, putting a star on the wall chart by Ani’s name for each.