Mrs. Schrub cleared her throat, and Jeromy apologized to me again for the accident, and this time Wilson apologized as well. He said something like, “Even though it was more Jeromy’s fault, since I called the kebab first.”
“Karim, can you settle this and check your recorder to see who called it?” Jeromy asked.
My stomach rotated. I waited to see if their parents would ask them to stop the fight, but they didn’t say anything. “Yeah, the tape won’t lie,” Wilson said.
I said, “I just put it away in my luggage upstairs and deleted today’s material. I did not want to make any of you uncomfortable about being recorded.”
They stopped discussing the accident, although I kept thinking about the voice recorder. It was like the window Raghid broke, although much worse: That truly was an accident that my friends didn’t take responsibility for, but this was a disloyal action that I didn’t take responsibility for, and in addition I further lied about it.
Wilson and Jeromy said they were going to a movie about a fighting organization after dinner. Mrs. Schrub said, “Why don’t you boys take Karim along?”
Wilson and Jeromy visually contacted. Jeromy was friendly, but Wilson was difficult for me to be near. Frequently that was the case here with sets of two people. I said, “Thank you, but I am taxed from the hike and prefer to stay home and read.”
After they left, Mr. Schrub said there was no reason we couldn’t watch our own movie, and he showed me his archive of DVDs and VHS tapes. He said he had bought everything on a recent list of the 100 best American movies of all time, and asked if there were any I had not seen yet that I wanted to. I said I had not seen any of them yet and if they were evaluated as the best movies of all time then I wanted to see all of them.
He said we could start with one from the top ten. I recognized most of the titles. Although I was interested in seeing it at some point, I didn’t want to watch Lawrence of Arabia with them. I picked The Wizard of Oz, as I knew it was the movie least related to real life and wouldn’t cause any problems for us.
Andre brought us popcorn and Coke and Mr. Schrub invited him to watch. The story was intriguing, and Mr. Schrub explained many political and economic analogs for the 1890s, e.g., the yellow brick is the gold standard and the tin man equals industrial workers. I think I liked the tin man the most, but not because of what he represented. Finally Mrs. Schrub told him to stop talking, although it always interests me when an artistic work has a one-to-one correlation of meaning with other systems.
When it was over, Mr. Schrub went to his office to do some work before bed. I read The Grapes of Wrath in the living room, and Mrs. Schrub joined me later to read her own book, whose title I didn’t know, and when she saw what I was reading she said, “I just adored that book when I read it in high school.”
I felt foolish that she read a book in high school that I was reading now, but I said, “I am adoring it as well.”
“I devoured Steinbeck in those days,” she said. “All those ’30s writers. Odets, and West…”
She looked around the living room at all the wooden and mirroring furniture and moved one finger over the light pink couch she was sitting on, and then said, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, huh? Though I suppose we all end up very different people from who we were at 16.”
I nodded again, because even though I was a skilled mathematician in high school, I never predicted at 16 that I would be working for Schrub Equities in New York and actually be a guest in the home of Derek Schrub.
And although I did aim to have as impressive a position as I do now, at that age I wasn’t thinking as much about making money.
We discussed the novel, and she told me more about the Great Depression and also about the charities she aided in New York. I lost count of how many she worked for and don’t remember all the names, but many of them helped the poor in the U.S. and outside the U.S., and she said the organizations she was most invested in supported females in developing countries.
I talked about Zahira and how I hoped to give her the opportunity to come to the U.S. at some point. Mrs. Schrub said, “That’s wonderful to hear. I wish more young men thought the way you do,” which was nice, but made me feel uncomfortable again because of the potential comparison to her sons.
Then we both read mutely for over an hour, and Mr. Schrub remained in his office, and because I periodically looked up to see if he was still there, Mrs. Schrub said, “I’m sorry Derek’s been holed up in there all weekend. You’ve gotten a pretty good idea of what we deal with.”
“I understand he must work frequently,” I said. “I am not offended by it.”
She closed her book. “Well, it’s past my bedtime,” she said. “Maybe the boys will be home soon and you can play some video games together. And if you get hungry, make yourself at home in the fridge.”
I thanked her again for hosting me and for dinner, even though I truly wanted to thank Andre for that.
I resumed reading downstairs, as I hoped Mr. Schrub would soon go upstairs, but he continued burning the midnight oil in his office. I was about to go to my room, with the plan to return in the middle of the night, when the door to his office opened and I heard Mr. Schrub say, “Karim, would you come here for a moment?”
My heart shifted position: He had seen the voice recorder. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t lie that I left it out and someone else must have put it in his office, because I had said that I put it in my luggage. It would be even more dishonest to blame someone else to boot. I would have to take responsibility and accept my punishment.
Mr. Schrub was already sitting in his chair, but he was facing the window. Only his desk lamp was on. We sat for several seconds in the partial darkness.
I was about to apologize when Mr. Schrub said, “Karim, I’m sorry.”
Even though it’s virtually silent because it’s digital, I was still afraid we might hear the voice recorder power on. His back was still turned, and I didn’t know if he meant he was sorry that I had been disloyal, so I asked, “What are you sorry about?”
He rotated back to me. His eyes were the color of red wine blended with water. “When you told me your mother died, after the Yankees game, I wasn’t very responsive.”
“You do not need to be responsive about that. It is not your problem,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “Still. My father died when I was a kid. How old did you say you were, again?”
I had not in fact said how old I was previously, but I told him 13. He pointed to himself. “Ten.”
He walked to the window. The moon produced some light, but the woods were dark. “It’s curious what you do and don’t recall from something that happened over half a century ago,” he said. “All I remember from when my mother told me is I was wearing this sweater. This navy blue sweater she’d knitted for me. I had to wear it every day in winter for two years because of the wool rations. And it had this loose thread, and I kept pulling it and pulling it while she explained to me what sometimes happens to soldiers during wars, especially brave fighter pilots, and finally she screamed at me to stop it or my sweater would completely disappear.”
“Sometimes people react in unpredictable ways when they hear about a death,” I said.
“Did you?” Then he turned from the window. “You don’t have to answer.”
“No,” I said. “I will.”
I talked about how several of my relatives came to Doha from around Qatar for my 13th birthday. “But they were truly coming to visit my mother for one terminal time,” I said, and I explained how she had breast cancer and the doctors had permitted us to move her to the apartment, which required transporting equipment and hiring a nurse. My father prepared much food the day before the party, including lamb, which was my mother’s preferred meal. “It was hard for her to chew the lamb, so he made hareis, which is cooked slowly and therefore fragile,” I said.