I understand a few things, I thought. One thing is you’re nuts.
You understand nothing of this story I telling, he continued. You think you know every thing, but you know nothing of what is happen next.
I’m sure you’re right, I said, and thought, What’s to understand? The whole world knows how this story ends!
How is your little daughter? he asked then. She is fine?
Andi? She fractured her wrist.
Fracture her wrist! You must be careful! I am not receive this photograph. You are sending?
You only just asked for it! I said, realizing that somehow I’d agreed to his request.
Outside the dressing cubicle, Ivana sighed, loudly.
You will fax this thing to me.
No can do, I replied.
You have not a — how you say — scanning device? But you are American! You have every kind of machinery!
He was trying to be charming.
Listen, I said. I’d like to leave my daughter out of this if you don’t mind.
She is intelligent, like her mother?
Of course, I said, not catching the flattery till it was too late.
Reading? Maybe writing little stories?
We try not to pressure her.
We? Who is we?
I’d like to make an appointment to discuss some questions I have, maybe next week?
Ivana, sensing my call would never end, clacked away from the dressing room.
Don’t trouble me with this thing. Make a note and send the translation.
Romei! You said the end of the year!
This is good. I would like the end of this month. I send you more tomorrow.
You must be reasonable, Romei!
What am I — engineer? There is no time! I am busy. Goodbye, and he was gone.
I felt unaccountably abandoned in my cubby — with its florescent lights and stray pins and mangled hangers, the faint sound of a machine somewhere registering something, the closed-circuit cameras, the ghosts of other women who’d prayed for miracles. Romei would never answer my questions! He had no respect for my profession, no respect for me.
I put my cotton bra back on, and my T-shirt. There would be no miracles today.
29. ROSH HASHANAH, MY ASS
The sky had turned the color of dishwater, so instead of walking off the chocolate croissants Jeanette had seen clinging to my thighs, I took the M7 up Amsterdam. When I got back to Slice of Park, I checked my messages:
Jeanette was glad I’d stopped by.
Someone named Asante was looking for Ralph. A matter of some emergency.
Benny wanted to talk:
I know this isn’t something you understand or believe, he said, but we’re supposed to atone during the High Holy Days. The rest of my life’s a mess, but I’m hoping you and I can make things right. Please? Call, or stop by the store.
When I was writing “Rose No One,” the Paul Celan story, Benny told me Rosh Hashanah was the birthday of the world — a perfect time, Rose thought, to begin again. Benny had helped — providing biographical details, offering variant translations of key Celan lines, challenging me to do better, and publishing the story eventually, though he’d said he wouldn’t. No one had ever taken such an interest in my work. Remembering this made me sad. We’d gotten along so well then. And now?
I looked over my shoulder at People of the Book. I’d made mistakes; if there was a moral bean-counter in the sky I hoped he’d be generous with me. Jeanette had been generous — more than generous; shouldn’t I be generous as well? So Benny was a friend of Romei’s and didn’t tell me, big deal! Maybe he didn’t want to get involved in our professional relationship. Weird, but okay.
Unless he already was involved.
Could it be? Had Benny referred Romei to me?
It made sense. They knew each other; Benny had given Romei my number. Benny was a literary guy — he knew lots of folks. Maybe Romei asked if he knew a translator. Maybe Benny hadn’t wanted to admit such a large favor. His involvement would explain why Romei had taken a chance on an unknown — he’d trusted Benny’s judgment!
All Benny had wanted was to do something nice for me!
I stood up again, ready to apologize. We could begin again, I thought, but then:
No. He couldn’t have given Romei my name! He didn’t know about my Dante translation, he’d never heard of Vita Nuova.
Might he still have recommended me? And I just happened to be an expert on an obscure work of Dante no one but me has ever read? Too large a coincidence.
A drop of rain landed on my nose.
I had it all wrong. It wasn’t up to me to reach out to Benny. It was up to him to come to me, to come clean. He hadn’t, he’d had his chances and he hadn’t.
Rosh Hashanah, my ass.
30. INTO THE ITALIAN SUNSET
The next morning, we sent Andi off for her first day of school. Ahmad knelt beside her, straightened her jumper, and handed her a notebook and pen — a foot-long pen with a red-knit pom-pom dangling from its end. He insisted it was his family’s tradition to give third graders notebooks so they could record their observations. Because they were “old enough” now, whatever that meant. Andi nodded solemnly, her eyes wide. I glared at Ahmad as Andi walked out the door clutching her notebook — looking, no doubt, for something to observe.
How like Ahmad, to show me up with school supplies!
•
More pages had arrived overnight, as promised: more “Screen,” a whole page and a half.
I didn’t want to read a scene in which a radiant Esther proclaims she must be free, free, free! Her husband begs her to stay, her child weeps in a corner, but proud Esther will not be moved! She walks with Romei into an Italian sunset. Or so I imagined, as I settled onto the loveseat.
Romei surprised me.
Esther and her narrator have not spoken of the future. Like all literary lovers, they live in an eternal present. In a poem called “Au(to) bade,” they curse the arrival not of the dawn but of the child’s school bus. So it’s a shock — to them and to us — when they return to Esther’s one day to find the apartment empty, the husband not in Palermo as planned, the child not in school, but both of them gone, their clothes gone, the jewelry given to Esther by her husband gone, her passport gone. All that remains, besides Esther’s clothes: her translation, a canceled bankbook, a manila envelope she doesn’t recognize.
Inside the envelope, photographs of the happy couple dating back to the fall; also, a letter from a family friend, a lawyer, assuring Esther that she’d forfeited her maternal rights and her rights to spousal support, begging her for the sake of all concerned not to press the issue — not that she has the money with which to return to the U.S., much less hire an attorney: her husband has left her penniless.
You have what you want, a note from him says. Now live with it.
Reminiscent of Dante’s karmic economy, the punishment horribly fitting the crime, this note suggests that our lovers are now in Hell. Be careful what you wish for!
And with this, Romei shifts from the present to the past tense: the narrator and Esther plunge into time, out of their lyric self-absorption, into something far more dynamic.
I imagined that at this point they turn to each other, knowing they are stuck with each other, their dream become nightmare. Game won and lost, they had their cake, now they had to eat it. I imagined they return to Romei’s silently, having lost their ability to speak. I imagined this but didn’t know: the section ended with the envelope and the note.