Or maybe a Moroccan neighborhood? Her husband was Moroccan. There was a teeny area in Astoria, there was a restaurant people liked.
Or maybe she would like to see where he grew up. Rudy had lived his first eighteen years in an East Village apartment his parents had cleverly subdivided, with a room for him with his own “treehouse,” aka a loft bed. His parents both worked for a left-leaning radio station — they were a stormy couple and were enchanted but neglectful parents. In his teen years his mother had begun to die, slowly and fitfully, from leukemia, and he and his father had cooked for her and played her favorite music all day and night, Otis Redding and John Lennon and Country Joe and the Fish. Now Rudy’s father lived upstate, with a new wife, but the old neighborhood on Second Avenue was not all that changed.
He would give Liliane a day or two, he didn’t pressure people. What if she said no? Either she would or she wouldn’t. What were the chances of her ever giving a penny to Hansen’s Hope? He’d say thirty percent. Sometimes he still thought like an investment banker. It would help his case to know more about the husband. She used her own last name, so the man couldn’t be Googled. And how many Moroccan sheikhs were there? A search brought up religious leaders, which could not be right.
It was ridiculous that the roof of a building that housed sick children in Tamil Nadu was still leaking because he hadn’t coaxed the funds out of a bored and overdressed old woman. He hated the way the world was set up, and he was sorry nobody wanted to overthrow these people anymore. He was sorry he couldn’t just squash her flat and drain all the money out of her, he really was.
Rudy was not in the best mood when he went out that night. He spent too many hours in a bar on Rivington Street, where he kept having one more beer to get over being pissed off (famous fallacies of the already-drunk) and he got into a conversation with some lunkhead who was holding forth about the Ground Zero Mosque, did it have to be in that spot, and who really, really was paying for it?
“It’s called Park51,” Rudy said. “That’s its name.”
“That’s what the Muslims call it,” the guy said. “You don’t happen to be a Muslim, do you? By any chance?”
Rudy thought of Liliane and was sorry she had to see his city at this particular inglorious moment. “I’m the rich terrorist who’s pouring all my piles of gold into the project,” Rudy said. “Can’t you tell?”
“Very funny,” the guy said.
“I’m a riot,” Rudy said. And then he got up and left, lunkishly.
He thought, as he walked to the subway, that Liliane must find it complicated to be, essentially, a Muslim in disguise. If her wedding was in a mosque, she had to have converted. He knew that much. And then the woman had flown three and half thousand miles all the way to New Fucking York to hear the bigoted crap you heard on every corner now.
Liliane was cheered by one thing in New York, the prices were very good here. Not all the styles in shop windows were that nice, but she had learned to find her way through Bloomingdale’s and had picked up a perfect sundress and some wonderful voile shirts she bought in three colors. Her euros went far, and just because she’d lost money didn’t mean she didn’t have any. What to get for her son, Emile? He was remarkably indifferent to clothes. Ahmed was the only one who’d ever bought him anything he liked. He still wore an ancient, stretched-out alpaca turtleneck his stepfather had given him. Ahmed himself had a tendency to give away whatever you gifted him with. Liliane had seen a drummer onstage in the club wearing an Armani sports jacket she’d bought Ahmed for his birthday. Ahmed managed to not let her or anyone be insulted either — he was so jolly and righteous and certain.
Bloomingdale’s had absolutely nothing that Emile would like, but she bought herself a very pretty cuff bracelet, chunks of coral and turquoise set in brass. It cost more than she meant to pay, and once she had it in her shopping bag, she was cranky and morose and regretful. She kept it anyway, as if she were defying herself.
Later, before she went to bed, Liliane was very happy to see a text message on her phone from her son. The cheeses were going well, which meant he was selling enough so they didn’t all go bad. Emile’s ambitions were modest. He had a boyfriend who was an architect, not getting much work these days, but they didn’t live together, and Emile seemed to feel no pressure to earn more and be richer.
Liliane had always wanted to be richer, though she had stopped being a gold digger after a certain point. When was that point? It was after she ran off with cash from the American clarinet player, and it was not because she felt bad about him. What did he need money for? Just to drink himself to ruin.
How terrific she had looked then, in the clothes that were chic enough to get a better catch. The catch she drew was an affectionate and generous man in his forties, who was a vice president of Carrefour and was divorced from a much dumpier woman. He seemed delighted to be with someone like Liliane, beautiful and full of fun, and he was not the worst lover either. But he was used to certain habits of command. He liked to summon her to come to him at two in the morning, he liked to tell her what to wear when they went out, and he fell into a vile, ugly outburst in a taxi once after she’d disagreed with him in front of his friends. “Inequities of wealth erode civility,” her friend Yvette, who was a Marxist, said. To suffer indignities from a man you were crazy about was not unusual, even for Liliane, but to be maltreated by someone you didn’t love was degrading. She had expected much more triumph in the arrangement, which, in the end, did not suit her at all.
And so she had gone from one barely solvent boyfriend to another, until the big surprise of her pregnancy, but at least she’d liked these men. She hadn’t known she was any sort of purist, but it turned out she was.
Rudy waited for Liliane to call the next day, and she didn’t. She doesn’t hate you, he reminded himself, but maybe she did. He remembered a very odd look on her face when he hugged her good night. Oh, fuck, he thought — didn’t he know better than to go around hugging Muslim women? What was the matter with him? He’d been to Malaysia, Sumatra, and north India, where you didn’t even shake hands—what was the matter with him?
But the next morning, he wasn’t in his office for five minutes before Veena, his assistant, told him Liliane was on the phone. “You must to show me the real city, not only the expensive parts,” Liliane said.
“At your service,” he said. “Ready when you are.”
“The real city,” she said.
What does a person want most? Rudy had been trained to think about that when cultivating prospects. He thought that Liliane, who always looked so beautifully put together, so effortlessly splendid for her age, probably wanted admiration. Nobody wears satin pants and mascara just for herself. He could bring some guy friends with him, just to hover around her, but that would make the outing less official, and he had only so much time to make his pitch while she was here. What a weird profession. At his jobs for colleges, he’d helped make “gift charts” in pyramids of how many donations they needed in various sizes, but HH was more of a by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation. His research on Liliane’s assets had only shown a small French firm that moved property around, in a somewhat hyperactive way, and he was pretty sure there was more than that. The bad news was that there was no record of her giving big bucks — big euros — to any charity. Perhaps he would be her first. The one you never forget.