Good on Paper (2 page)

But that was spring. By summer, Clyde’s Gal Friday was back, and I was let go: a temp is a temp is a temp, after all; there’d been no talk of
us
or
tomorrow
.

Really? I’d asked while buttoning my top.

If the girl needs time off, I’ll ask for you, he said.

I felt shabby, then, and out of sorts.

Since then, there’d been Falafel Dynasty, the Workers’ Museum, the doll importer, and now the proportional-folding system.

I need something different, I told Durlene from the supply closet. Really different. A new start.

That’s what you said before: I got you a
charity
!

I know, I said. Prosthetic legs, they’re important.

Sticking
is important, she said. Sticking means temp to perm. You do want something
permanent
, right? You’re not one of these folks who thinks the world’s going to end with Y2K, are you?

It was then that I got the call.

It was Ahmad. Friend of my youth, roommate, co-parent.

Gotta go, Durlene! Sorry!

Shira! I need you to stay! Do not quit this job!

Other line! I said. Gotta take it. Could be my kid!

Do not quit this job, Shira!

You shtupping your boss? Ahmad asked when I switched lines. Your voice has that breathless quality.

I’m not breathless, I’m whispering. Is Andi okay?

Of course Andi’s okay, but you won’t believe what I have in my hand.

Don’t play with me, I said. You interrupted an important meeting.

Ahmad laughed. I couldn’t help laughing, too.

You’ve got a telegram.

A what? I asked, even though I’d heard him perfectly well. (A
telegram
? Was there even such a thing anymore?)

A telegram, he said. Shall I open it for you?

I don’t believe it, I said.

I assure you, Ahmad said. It is here in my hands. The young man who delivered it was quite delectable. We have a date—tonight. We’re going
bowling
.

You sure it’s not about Andi?

Andi is three blocks away. If something happened, science camp would call.

Wait, I said, and leaned back against a wall of copy paper, and told myself to breathe.

A telegram could mean only one thing. My mother, MIA since I was seven. She’d found me. Or she was dead and someone else had found me.

Don’t open it, I said.

Ahmad didn’t speak.

I mean it, Ahmad! Don’t open it.

I heard a tearing sound.

Don’t open it! I shrieked.

Oh! Ahmad said, and then silence. You won’t believe this.

I hung up, then pleaded
Emergency
and left for the day, even though, as Mr. Ferguson reminded me, envelopes don’t stuff themselves. I pulled Andi from science camp, whispering to her Enrichment Facilitator that Andi’s aunt Emma had died, wishful thinking on my part.

Just in the nick of time, Andi muttered, dragging her Pretty Princess backpack behind her. We were learning about
tectonic shifts
. If the crust of the earth is moving, she said, shaking her braids, I don’t want to know about it.

Indeed
, I thought, and squeezed her, and suggested she take off her lab coat so we could be off to see the Wizard, which to Andi meant a trip to Kmart. Which earned me a hug.

I love you when you buy me things, she said.

2

NOT WHAT YOU THINK

Our apartment, lent to us by Ahmad’s university, was a stately brick affair at the junction of Broadway and West End. By Manhattan and possibly other standards, it was enormous: come the revolution, it would be divided among three, if not four, proletariat families. We called it the Den of Propinquity—joking, because the place was large, also not joking, because some days it seemed hardly large enough.

The Den was decorated largely to Ahmad’s taste: elegant and minimal. Large earth-toned kilims, comfortable leather couches, Chinese vases on sleek teak tables. My room, next to Andi’s, was rather bare, though I’d lived in Ahmad’s apartment since before Andi was born: a few posters tacked to the wall—Corot’s
Isola Tiberina
, Caravaggio’s
Calling of St. Matthew
. A single bed (natch), the obligatory rag rug. I’ve never invested much in things: any day—or so the theory went—we might move on.

Andi wanted to show Ahmad the satin clothes hangers I’d gotten her (her choice), but he wasn’t in his room, and he wasn’t in the kitchen. Which meant he was in his studio, where he painted when he wasn’t teaching undergraduates about Depression Economics and the Economics of Change: fantasies that combined Indian gods, images iconic of the materialist West, and the Italian forms we grew up with—a haloed Ganesh squatting behind bars at the zoo, Ahmad, a donor in robes, kneeling before him. It was the one place neither Andi nor I could ever, ever go. I joked that Ahmad could keep the blue
beards of his conquests there, if only his conquests were old enough to have beards, ha ha.

Put the hangers on the dining room table, I told her. He’ll look at them later.

On the table, a note:
You won’t be sorry
. Under it, a folded telegram.

Again that grinding in my belly. I turned toward Ahmad’s studio.

Mom!
Andi called out, horrified, but it couldn’t wait.

Ahmad was in a far corner, drawing on an architect’s table—so intently, he hadn’t heard me enter.

Mom!
Andi hissed at me from the door.

Ahmad looked up.

My hands were shaking.

Tell me, I said. Tell me what it is. Unless I shouldn’t know. Unless it’s something I don’t want to know. Do I really want to know?

Sweetie! he said, and stood, noting Andi past my shoulder. You’ve got it all wrong! and he grabbed me. It’s okay, he said, then whispered so Andi wouldn’t hear: I promise it’s not what you think. I promise!

My whole body was shaking.

Are you sure? I murmured into his ear.

I should have just told you. It’s a job. Go! Look.

Why is Mommy crying? Andi asked, still standing at the doorway.

Because she’s been offered the most amazing job in the world, Ahmad said. Anyone would cry. Go! he said, giving me a little shove. Look.

I got satin hangers for my dresses, I heard my daughter say. Look!

Let me guess, Ahmad said. They’re pink?

They’re pink! Andi exclaimed.

•

Damn it, I thought. Thirty-five years gone and still you do this to me?

I looked around for my mom-bag, where I kept the
MOM!
handkerchief Andi had embroidered, but couldn’t find it. I settled for my sleeve.

Please
, the telegram read,
you do to me the pleasure of translating my work. I am calling to you soon. Grazie. Romei
.

Romei? As in the poet, winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, the only constellation in my sky for one sad moment in the eighties? Had Ahmad not said what he’d said, I’d have assumed the joke was his. (Last month, “Sonny Mehta” called, asking if I’d translate jet-engine specs for an anthology tentatively titled
Heaving on a Jet Plane
. I retaliated by having a barista leave messages from “Ollie North,” asking if Ahmad could keep a secret.) Ahmad didn’t approve of my underemployment, not when (according to him) the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, located in Rome for reasons best known to history, would pay me good lire to translate reports on wheat varieties and integrated pest management: he knew someone who knew someone who definitely knew someone!

This joke wasn’t Ahmad’s, but I knew any number of translators, some of them exes, who were capable of such high humor.

I crumpled the telegram and threw it like a fast ball toward the kitchen.

You’re littering, Mom.

Andi was at my side again, holding her satin hangers.

Your mom’s a litterer, I said. You have homework?

Very funny.

I must have looked at her blankly.

Summer, Mom? Camp? Remember? I’m your only daughter, Andi?

Right, I said. Play till dinner. I’ve got to think about some things.

She didn’t move.

Go on, sweetie. I’m fine. Okay, hug me first. That’s good. Okay, hug me again.

•

We reconvened for tea. And cereal, because I hadn’t had lunch. Ahmad tried to convince me the offer was serious. Why not? he asked.

It’s not even an offer—it’s a maybe offer. Besides, I know who did this, and it’s not a Nobel Prize–winning poet. Pass the milk, please.

Who?

It doesn’t matter, I said, looking pointedly at Andi. Just a person I used to know. A person who likes attention.

Ahmad waited.

A translator, I said. Someone I used to know but don’t know anymore.

Did I know you once knew this person?

Maybe, maybe not.

After Ahmad and Roger broke up, we agreed never to bring men home again, not in thought, word, or deed. Out of consideration for Andi and, frankly, each other. An understanding we’d formalized one evening by spitting Armagnac out the window. Though usually we debriefed at the end of an off-site affair—debriefings Ahmad called
man-wakes
. Not this time.

You going to call him on it? Ahmad asked.

I’m going to give this telegram the attention it deserves.

Mommy littered with it, Andi explained.

I nodded, and the buzzer rang. It was a delivery guy. Holding a fax machine and a case of European A4-size paper. And a note thanking me for doing the
honore
. I must communicate with Romei only by fax, his work must
never
be interrupted by telephone. He would call to me; I would receive the first section “anon.”

Expensive joke, Ahmad said.

The note had a fax number. It looked like a Roman telephone number. I brought my cereal to the study.

The study, just off the kitchen, was small but large enough for Ahmad’s velveteen loveseat, a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and an escritoire, on which rested my computer, slow but serviceable. It had once been an industrial-size walk-in pantry, back in the day when university professors “entertained”; since that ancient time, someone had removed the shelves and added track lighting, probably so it could serve exactly this purpose. Ahmad had his office at school, and that office had amenities like doors and windows, so this little room was mine. I’d rigged a door out of a drape and curtain rod, which offended Ahmad’s aesthetic sensibility, but it was better, he said, than watching me hunt and peck at the keyboard while he was trying to cook.

I turned on my computer and visited the chat room of the Translators of Note. I was, nominally, a member, though largely on sufferance: I still went to meetings and organized our chapter’s annual Bloomsday pub hop, but my translation oeuvre was not substantial. It consisted of what I’d managed to finish of Dante’s
Vita Nuova
before I dropped out of grad school, plus a slim volume of stories by a writer who, like me, was said never to have reached her potential, and a few feuilletons—always the lesser-known works of lesser-known writers. It goes without saying that I never earned two dollars doing this good work. Except once: a suspect Italian-American society commissioned me to translate D’Annunzio, but they ran out of cash by chapter three.

I had a few projects going—a volume of Calabrian ghost tales, poems by a Trilussa contemporary—though by
going
I mean that I thought about them once in a while. They didn’t capture my imagination, and always it seemed my spare time was better spent otherwise, like doing laundry or taking Andi to the park.

In the chat room, Josh, prime suspect, had been pronouncing just that afternoon. Using the handle “Chive Pancake,” he’d shared his too-extensive opinions about an Ionesco opening he’d seen in Brooklyn the night before, performed by Kabuki actors—the lousy translation, the perfectly
awful
set design. He’d been comped by the lead actress, don’t you know. He definitely was not in Rome.

If he hadn’t sent the telegram, who had?

I had Ahmad hook up the fax machine on one of the shelves of my bookcase, then sent my own note:

I don’t know who you are but your joke isn’t funny. Go away
.

P.S. I’m keeping the fax
.

3

THE SINGULAR PILGRIM