“No, no,” she said. “Not little coins. I am a major donor to a fund we have that helps the homeless musicians, you know, the ones who play and beg. Some of them are very good!”
“That’s wonderful of you.”
“I have given to them more than I ought to. Nothing left. I’m glad.”
“Many of our lepers,” Rudy said, “are found living on the streets. Well, I can’t call them our lepers.”
“They’re yours, not mine!” she said, laughing.
“All our cities,” he said, “are full of suffering. New York too.”
“I very much am looking forward,” she said, “to getting out now to the countryside. The mountains are cooler, yes? It will be peaceful.”
“You’ll have a great time with your friends, I know,” he said. “We’ll miss you, but I wouldn’t want to keep you from going.”
He’d given up, she could tell. He knew when defeat had arrived. He pushed back his hair and rubbed his eyes, as if he were already alone.
But that was not the end of the story. Liliane realized she’d better say goodbye, since she probably wasn’t going to see Rudy again before she went back to Paris. It actually had been a pleasure, hadn’t it, despite his having made an imbecile of himself trying this way and that to work her. She thought she might leave just a token donation, out of politeness, and because she was not heartless.
Rudy said, “You know, maybe Bamala will have henna on her hands for her wedding like you did. They do that in India too.”
Could he not stop? But Liliane found herself holding out her own hands, as if a design were on them. As a child, she’d had to hold them like that when her father smacked them with a belt buckle to punish her, but that was another story. One probably familiar to this Bamala. Human life had always been atrocious; no one had to tell Liliane that.
“I hope her wedding day is as beautiful as mine was,” Liliane said.
Ahmed had always said he hated the stinginess of the French. When Liliane left the office, she had signed away fifteen thousand dollars on her credit card. Quite a heady sensation, she noticed. She hadn’t known she was going to do that. Rudy had probably hoped for much more — who knew what most of those donors gave? — but his face had been very tender with thanks and he had said it would greatly help one badly leaking roof.
“People will be dry there this fall,” he said. “Insha’Allah.”
On the way back to the hotel she was really in quite a wonderful frame of mind. As if she had just been on a great shopping spree. Which she had. She couldn’t wait to tell Emile, who always accused her (silently and otherwise) of being shallow.
Later she wondered if she had made a mistake. She’d come to New York to forget how much money she’d lost, and she had just managed to dole out another wad. She felt preposterous, an old puppet of comic twists. He had been dogged with her, in his nice-boy way, and then she had turned around and surprised him. Which she still knew how to do. She had known how to wait before she caught him off guard.
What an odd story she had to tell, when she got back to Paris: she’d come all this way to drop a bundle of money on poor people in South Asia. People she’d never met! She’d never done such a thing in her life. Never too late! She could tell the story in a way that didn’t make her look entirely foolish. Or she could keep it to herself.
Now she was a friend to lepers: she was getting used to the idea, she liked it. So this was the end to her time in New York, an ugly and interesting city. Une histoire qui finit bien. Rudy, that awkward boy, was probably being congratulated by the staff in his office. Maybe they were toasting her with little plastic cups. To Liliane! She hoped he was leading the toast. Despite the rudeness of his not having hugged her goodbye this time.
She wanted to tell Ahmed what she had done. He would have thought well of her for it, would have gotten that look of beaming pleasure on his face — he tended to applaud people who acted rashly out of their better natures. He liked nothing better than that, and would not have allowed anyone to see anything ridiculous in what she’d just done. And who would, who in the world? She had never in her life been someone people laughed at.
Acknowledgments
For their good advice and great generosity, I want to thank Andrea Barrett, Myra Goldberg, Kathleen Hill, Margot Livesey, and Chuck Wachtel. I am grateful, as ever, to my agent, Geri Thoma, and to my new editor, Jill Bialosky. For their helpful conversation, a thank you to Elspeth Leacock and Claudia Leacock. Special thanks once again to Sharon Captan for her friendship.
The story “Fools” appeared previously in Northwest Review, “Two Opinions” and “Better” appeared in Epoch, and “Buying and Selling” appeared in Agni. “Two Opinions” is included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. "Fools" is included in New America: Contemporary Literature for a Changing Society, ed. Holly Messitt and James Tolan (Autumn House, 2013).
Additional Praise for Fools
“The linked characters in Joan Silber’s collection Fools. go from the fiercely principled (young anarchists in 1920s Greenwich Village) to the fervently hedonistic (a newly married hotelier’s son who can’t resist temptation). But it’s those who admit their ambivalence — such as the daughter of a conscientious objector whose life detours from the wifely domesticity she envisioned — who approach true dissidence.”
— Vogue
“Elegant. Timely.”
— Village Voice
“A memorable meditation on work, religion, love, and the search for personal integrity.”
— Booklist, starred review
“Powerful and moving. Recalls Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad in its novelistic cohesion of multiple sprawling tales.”
— Library Journal, starred review
“Joan Silber’s stories are like compressed novels. They are interlocking tales that fill in the history of revolutionary politics in the twentieth century.”
— Edmund White
“Fools is astonishing for its range, for its sweeping sense of time and place, and most especially for its deep insight into the way small choices can circle out to shape lives, and even human history. This is a beautiful book and an important literary achievement.”
— Dan Chaon
“Joan Silber’s stories charm us. And amuse us. And engage us. And move us. And even enlighten us. Fools embraces us all.”
— Amy Bloom
“Joan Silber is one of the wisest, finest, most capacious observers of the human condition writing now. We should all be as heartbreakingly foolish and beautiful as the characters in this collection. Silber understands them inside out, and brings them close to us, as no one else can.”
— Stacey D’Erasmo
“Fools is a unique and fascinating collection that celebrates not so much a place or a family or a single life as it does an idea — anarchy — as it runs through three generations of loosely connected people. The collective vision this provokes is what makes the book intellectually satisfying; the separate lives it convincingly displays are what move the heart.”
— Antonya Nelson
“In Joan Silber’s dazzling new story collection, written in elegant prose and with clairvoyant wisdom, the loves and aspirations, both spiritual and material, of six very different people reaffirm in unexpected ways the fallibility and the essential sameness of our human condition.”