The Last Life (47 page)

And how many times would I stand thus, in a lifetime, now that there was nothing around me to hold on to, or believe in? And when I asked myself the question "Is life worth living?" would the answer ever come to me, as it had, in some darkness, to my father, "This life? No."

I am American now, or passably so—as much, my Aunt Eleanor insists, as anybody else is. I have, through boarding school and university, accrued the topsoil and sprouting shrubbery necessary to make a landscape mine, as much as anyone's. Aunt Eleanor and Uncle Ron stand like old oaks at the edge of my vista, scarred and reassuringly laden, while Becky and Rachel are sturdy saplings in their parents' broad shade, almost invisible, but rooted there. Before them, reaching towards me, ripple the long grasses of my years in this place, dotted here and there with larger outgrowths, some neglected (acquaintances and even friends along the way, relationships of circumstance and time that have, of necessity, withered) and others flourishing, faithful, never dying. It is not a broad acreage, that floats in my mind's eye, but it is sufficient, and watered, and it grows.

One of the first foreign students I met in New Hampshire, not long after my bewildered arrival there, she older and preparing already to leave, was a round-faced Indian girl from Kenya, with a shiny black braid and loose, jewel-colored wrappings, who wrinkled her fine nose, in the curl of which a speck of diamond twinkled, and informed me that being American was simple: "The one requirement," she sniffed, "and there is only one—but one I cannot bear—is that you believe in America, that you believe it is the best place."

I believe, at least, that it is real, and that I am here. But I have taken her at her word: I would not ever openly profess disbelief, and that, thus far, has been enough. In other regions, out in the country's vast wavering plains and valleys that I do not know, I worry that my disguise would be blown from me in a strong wind, that I might stand revealed; but I do not venture there, and so have stayed safe. In the city there are millions like me, of all hues and of hidden histories. We keep mum together and are believed. Sufficiently so.

I rent a studio apartment on the Upper West Side, the same four walls and constantly running toilet (like a brook of my own) and exposed brick trim, the same galley kitchen and scuffed floorboards that I claimed in my second year at Columbia and have kept mine since. I believe—this is a faith—that the air inside my apartment is different, that my hidden history lingers there as a faint flavor on the back of the tongue, indescribable but familiar. In this room, with its intermittent shafts of sunlight and its smeared panes, its low trickles of music and tappings and raised voices from other apartments, above and beside mine, is a place that is my own. It contains few accumulations—a double bed, quilt-covered, scattered with pillows to resemble a couch; a long desk made of a door, sanded and laid upon trestles, atop which rest notebooks, papers and the bland face of my computer; a tufted chintz armchair, in which I rarely sit, and then only to catch the breeze from the broad windows; a dented filing cabinet, which serves also as a coffee table; a scattering of rugs; some lamps; a picture or two (
the
picture among them); a cheap bookshelf; a bulletin board. At the end of my bed rests my old steamer trunk, still decorated with the fraying stickers of its Adantic crossing, its rows of brass studs dull now. The blinds at the window are pink, slatted plastic: they preceded me here. I have a hallway, a storage cupboard. I have plywood cabinets in the kitchen, the doors of which hang unevenly, and a countertop open to the main room, against which sit two once-fashionable chrome bar stools. I have a shower curtain of clear plastic, decorated with a map of the world, the countries so dispersed as to satisfy a bather's modesty.

To a visitor, these rooms give nothing away; they are not meant to. They reveal themselves only to me. I have been in rooms—have glimpsed them, too, along the very corridors of my building—in which the secrets of a life spill forth, in piles and jumbles, rooms cluttered to the ceiling with the debris of years; and I am scornful of them, as of a life that cannot be distilled, and carried, quiet, in the heart.

Is my own life carried quiet? Probably not, within; but it is carried nonetheless, in another, private language, in the French cadences that echo in my sleep. Being American, I live, in the world outside, in English, as many years ago I longed to do, in the broad, twanging vernacular and exuberant elisions, in the vacuous shorthand ("How ya doin'"? "Good thanks. You?") of which the greatest proportion of my exchanges is comprised. Outside my windows, the city buzzes, honks, thrills and stinks. Like the Bellevue, it has its seasons—the steamy, urine-pocked drafts of summer, haze-clouded, sweating, a weighted sheen on the flat of my cheeks for months; the crisp of autumn, in which the masses step more spritely; the subterranean steam of winter, when great bowls rise up through the asphalt and dissipate in the bitter, clear air, in which the corner vendors' sugared almonds, and pretzels, and sausages, ring in the nostrils like musical notes. I move through the city, after all this time, like a spy, hoarding the sensations, hoarding myself, garbed and disguised even in the movement of my eyes. Raised in a nation of frank stares, I have learned to observe without looking, to use the watery edges of my vision as precisely as a magnifying glass, to know, like a language, the minute gestures of aggression, or fear, to pick out the lunatic fringe in the apparently gentlest of faces. All this transmits without words: Etienne could have learned it, too; but he will never come here.

My mother visits me every year, once or twice. When she telephones, I do not recognize her voice. That is to say, I recognize it as the voice belonging to the woman who is my mother, but it bears little resemblance to the voice of my recollection, the voice of the woman who raised me and was married to my father, who railed against the LaBasse family and the Bellevue, the voice whose hands braided my hair in childhood so tightly that my eyes watered, whose pointed chin puckered and trembled so violently on the cusp of tears, whose frail and spiny shoulder blades fluttered beneath my adolescent embrace. Flensed, that mother did not survive. The woman who emerged, in time, brittle and clasped, reconstructed (or was it a truer self emerging?), is wholly other. The better for her. She has done things of which my earlier mother would never have been capable. She has eggplant-colored hair, and unabashedly contemplates plastic surgery.

1 had no idea, at the airport in Nice, sixteen years old and trepidatious, arrogant, armored (or so I thought)—I had no idea of what I thought I knew. Of what was over, of what death really was. I knew there would be no turning back, but I knew it the way I had known about death before my father's came, when I believed, somehow, in permanent change as a temporary measure. And although I thought I knew to be careful what I wished for, I didn't, perhaps, know the meaning of "too late." Even now, when I lock myself out of my apartment, and yet can see, in my mind, the exact position of my keys on the kitchen counter, ready to be snatched up—I cannot quite accept that those keys are inaccessible to me, that in the instant in which I slammed the door they became irretrievably, unsalvageably distant, on the other side, in the might-have-been, the ought-to-have-been; and it is only belatedly and with greatest reluctance that I summon the super, or the locksmith—depending on the hour—admitting thereby that I cannot will the keys—and yet I see them, so exactly, and can feel their slippery coldness, their jagged runs—into my present pocket; that my error cannot be undone.

The boarding school, when finally I arrived there, deposited by Ron with bursts of anxious laughter and an awkward hug, consumed me, as it was supposed to do. The clattering cafeteria breakfasts, the worn stone stairwells, the whirling frenzy of the activities so beautifully frozen in the catalogue—these novel routines spun like colored pinwheels, devoured my days. I had a roommate, a lumpen midwestern girl whose bones I failed, in a full year, to locate, even her wrists and shoulders were so discreetly couched in the floury paleness of her flesh. Her hair, too, was pale and sparse, an infant's down on her post-chemotherapy skull. She had had leukemia as a child, and survived; for which, in principle, one admired her; but there was little to love in her slothlike stillness, her grainy, breaking voice, her faint seaweed smell. The swiftest thing about her was her pet gerbil, a sleek little monster at its squeaking wheel, which creature she freed, on occasion, out of pity or malice, so that several times I discovered tiny black droppings on my pillowcase and once, to my alarm, the very rodent crouching there, its eye glittering with defiance.

This roommate and I were not destined to be friends. We were civil—a courtesy on which I congratulated myself, particularly after the gerbil incident—but sought companionship elsewhere. I joined a book club, tried my hand at amateur dramatics, volunteered my services tutoring French to struggling pupils. I skirted personal revelation, in the late-night common room sessions—conducted in flannel nighties with copious doses of watered cocoa to hand—by feigning, initially, a lack of comprehension, and then by outright hes. They came more easily in English: I was an only child, I said, whose father had succumbed, suddenly, to an allergic reaction. Sometimes he had taken medication, sometimes he had been stung by a bee. When I learned of nut allergies, I had him felled by a contaminated pie crust. These things all seemed possible; they seemed to satisfy. I managed, too, to undress only within locked shower stalls or under cover of darkness, thereby concealing the persistent ravages of my back, all the more abhorrent among girls of pink and glowing dermatological perfection. I thought of myself as a young Muslim, faithfully bound to modesty. And at times it amazed me, how persuasively I skittered along the surface of a life, befriended, involved, unknown. Or rather, more accurately, it amazed me how incurious my peers proved—they who told all, about their drinking mothers and raging fathers, who catalogued in endless detail their parents' divorces and their siblings' brushes with the law.

On Sunday evenings before chapel, when she could get through (there were only two telephones for forty of us in the house), my mother called; and she wrote, too, every week. But she, like me, played games of omission and revealed to me essentially nothing of her day-to-day, or of Etienne's; and still less about the faltering Bellevue and my grandfather's attempts to fill it. At first, the twins wrote also, stiff, mundane missives on flowered paper (doubtless composed in front of the television), closed with protestations of their affection. But I could not begin to answer, my existence as remote as the Amazon, and these communiqués soon petered out.

I did not miss them. My days were too absorbing, the lurch into a translated life (math and the sciences were most befuddling) too thorough a demand for me to question it. Was I happy, unhappy? It did not matter. The question was not germane. I was learning, a new self and a new way, broken, with a resounding snap, from the old. In time I bought American clothes, styled my hair in an American cut, chewed gum with the best of them, determined to master my guise more enchantingly than my mother had hers. I was younger, more adaptable, and the society in which I moved more welcoming, or at least less attentive to difference.

As for boys, they had no place, in the early days, in my geography. Their dormitories lay across an open field, which seemed, most conveniently, to mark their distance. When, towards the end of my senior year, I lost my virginity, it was to a former history teacher, a married, mostachioed man in his thirties, no taller than I was, who thrilled to my virgin-ness and, though solicitous and tender, doubtless chalked the conquest of my hymen upon a lengthening list of same, while never for an instant considering me over his Quaker wife, with her Mona Lisa smile (she was one of the school nurses, as it happened, and would, had I asked her, have furnished me with condoms for her spouse's infidelity; though in the event he took care of the matter), and his two rubicund and cherubic infants. Nor was it, for me, a matter of love; I used the opportunity as I saw it, and was grateful that it preceded my graduation by only a couple of months, allowing for several trysts, or practice runs, in which sex did indubitably improve (for me, at least), before I embarked, and freed us both from further obligation. He was called Mr. Wilson, and although, in our rushes of intimacy, he must have revealed to me his given name, I can no longer summon it, however clearly my upper lip recalls the silky bristling of his moustaches.

But that was much later. In those first months, I looked, occasionally, from my scattered notes and sleepy hours of study, towards Christmas, and home, and thought the prospect gilded. I was, as I have said, too frantic to be homesick, but still, as I had with my aunt and uncle and cousins, I regarded this adventure as a temporary displacement, and heard the genuine ticking of my life's clock from afar, its mechanics firmly embedded in Mediterranean soil. As the holidays approached, I gloated, picturing my roommate's glum return to some clapboard farmhouse snowbound on a pancake plain, and my newfound companions drifting off to the slushy suburbs of New York and Washington, D.C. Some, the farthest-flung, whose parents served time in Dubai or Karachi or Accra, had to make do with others' Christmases—as I, had I but known it, would the following year find myself at Ron and Eleanor's, kneading chestnut stuffing alongside Becky and recalling our distant weekend on the Cape. But that first Christmas I was going home; a journey that impressed my fellows, and even me.

When I spotted my mother behind the partition at Nice, I began to bob and wave. And when, as I drew near to her, I glimpsed my brother grinning in his chair (it was an effort, considerable, for her to have brought him), I found my eyes instantly, unwillingly wet, and my cheeks damp as if they, too, had sweated out tears. At a run, I tried to encircle both mother and brother in a single swoop, and succeeded in banging my stuffed handbag against Etienne's pearly ear, hard enough to make him yelp.