Marie-Anne turned both hands at the wrists. “We are not talking about what these things are objectively. What we are talking about is what a book represents to George Gabriel. Not anyone else.”
“So, ultimately, you agree with him.”
She circled around the room and started loosening her robe. “Forget it. Think what you want. Don’t take my approach. I have a train to catch so I am going to go get ready. Can you call me a cab in the meantime?”
“Yeah. Fine.”
“And I hate to ask this, but I’m going to be in Virginia all week. I’m going to work out there. Do you have any poems for me?”
“No poems,” I said. “I was going to write one over lunch. ”
“All right,” she said in a resigned voice. “I’ll find some of the old ones.”
I sat quietly, alone and increasingly drunk, until my eyelids and then my face fell to the side. I passed out and curled up on the sofa. Marie-Anne came by about an hour later. She smelled of black musk and her face had an aubergine darkness to it. She pulled my head back and looked me in the eye. “Did you get me the cab?”
“No.”
“Fuck it. I’ll just go out into the tundra with my bags and chase one myself.” She slammed the door on her way out.
In a couple of hours I got up. Drool streaked on the side of my face. I wiped it away with the inside of my wrist, and headed toward the kitchen. Ignoring the mess already present, I opened the fridge and prepared a Parmesan, ham, and mushroom frittata, along with some salted beef boudin.
With each bite that went down to my belly, more of the argument with Marie-Anne came back. Her idea was the apogee of stupidity. I couldn’t dis what I didn’t even avow. Besides, a miniature Koran inside a cover, sitting on a stand unread, in proximity of clearly irreligious things like Nietzsche and Goethe, was just what I had said it was: a decoration. Nothing could be read into a decoration. It was just one of those things people had, like a mezuzah outside a door, or a cross between Lady Gaga’s breasts, or a Balinese mask representing some ancient deity no one cared about. If Richard was right and George really was motivated by religious prejudice, if all he was doing was drawing me into the old wars of dogma and bigotry, I was simply going to refuse that game.
I picked up the remote to find some updated cartoons. SpongeBob and Patrick were on another channel. They had donned a pair of nun habits and ran after a curved-nosed villain with thin limbs and a potbelly.
* * *
I slept the night on the sofa. I woke up at the moment of quantum silence in the middle of the night when even the air in the house became devoid of movement. I was the only particle that attained motion. I went to the study and trailed my hand over the small desk from Antique Row. I toed the carved cabriole legs. I tugged at its handles. I inhaled it so hard it levitated. I had filled its drawers for Marie-Anne to browse through, with little mementos and keepsakes for her to discover. But she had run her hand over the desk and not delved into it. She hadn’t wondered what she might find inside.
I sat on the chair, opened a drawer, and drew out the family albums. There was my family. The three of us seemed so negligible compared to Marie-Anne’s mammoth clan. My family’s pictures were almost all indoors, because for the bulk of their lives my parents were people who paid rent. Marie-Anne’s family’s pictures are almost all outdoors. They were people of land, people of substance, owners of legacy.
My parents made me smile. My small bespectacled father — meager lab technician — and my short-haired mother who stayed at home and raised me. They had come to America through luck, by having their name called in the immigration lottery. Because it was chance that brought them here, they always lived in fear of chance turning against them. The first job my father got, he held it, and the first role my mother had, that of raising me, she held that. Every now and then they would talk, in quiet tones, about launching a business, or aiming for another job, or getting financing for a house, but would veto themselves. “That’s risky,” my mother would say. “It’s chancy,” my father would add. That would be that.
The one thing they believed in was the myth of American meritocracy. That seemed to them to be utterly devoid of risk. “America is the only place in the world where performance trumps blood,” my father said to me often, even if the stories we heard every day contradicted his belief. My parents were convinced that if I performed well in all the tests that America gives its children, then I would be able to reach the highest echelon of society. I was their one risk-free investment. And I was happy to say that as long as they were alive I more or less vindicated them. I did well in school, got a scholarship to college, and, after only a short period of aimlessness, found a stable job where I received a stable paycheck. I had done everything they had ever dreamed for me.
My decision to marry Marie-Anne was the only thing my parents ever questioned — because they thought it was a risky thing for a nonwhite to marry a white — but once I explained to them that she and I related to one another through our shared interests, values, and status as Southerners, they let go of it as well. If they’d had a problem with Marie-Anne, if they thought they had lost me, they would’ve picked some end-of-life fight with me. Perhaps accused me of throwing away the past. But they didn’t do anything like that. They came and tucked the past in a corner where no one would find it. And they left.
I was glad they were gone. If they were still alive they wouldn’t have been able to handle seeing my American life decapitated by their inadvertent hand. It would’ve killed them.
Then again, if they were still alive I might have been able to borrow some money for the bills I was still responsible for.
* * *
The Koran had been sitting on the coffee table since Marie-Anne left. After breakfast the next morning, I sat down before it and made an inspection.
I started with the wooden holder. It was in the shape of a butterfly with rounded edges, made of mango wood, with intricately carved eight-pointed lattices in the wings. The color was a brushed plum brown, and there were hinges in the center that cradled the spine of a book, allowing it to sit open between the wings. I had once seen a black-and-white picture of my mother as a young girl, head covered, eyes lowered, sitting before such a holder. I put the holder aside.
Next I worked the cloth pouch. My fingers trailed over my name. The thread that my mother had used to do the embroidery was some kind of high-quality velvet. She must have remembered my fondness for velvet. The glittery cloth was also quite weighty, having a texture similar to an antique brocade sofa.
The Koran itself was the least impressive thing in the set. The zipper cover was made of cheap plastic and the zip got stuck at various pins. The calligraphic writing on the side and the dados on the cover were impossible to discern because dark green ink had been used on a black background. With my index finger I found the cloth bookmark and flipped back to the Chapter of the Hidden Secret. I skimmed over it for a moment. Purity and torment and guardians of the hellfire and blackened faces and donkeys alarmed by lions. It made no sense to me. I wrapped the Koran back up and returned it to the holder and resumed staring.
As a child I had never consciously rejected Islam. I simply hadn’t cared for it, nor had it struck me that that there was any benefit in belief. The old religions were the politics of the past, lingering on due to the irascibility of ritual, the nostalgia of the adherents, and because appealing to certain dead men still led to good fundraising hauls. Since my interest was in the politics of the present, it had made no sense to bother getting involved with what was so evidently anachronistic. It had also helped that my parents, aside from preaching abstention from pork, and abstention from sex till marriage, hadn’t bothered to impart Islam to me as a doctrine. This allowed me to see it as one of those things that foreigners did, like Soccer, or Kung Fu, or Bollywood. As a teenager, then, my focus had been on more secular things. How to hide my parents’ accent (keep far away from them). How to make people blind to the color of my skin (stand close to Marie-Anne). How to best Anglicize my name (rearrange the syllabic emphasis). Once in college there had been Muslim students who had tried to reach out to me, but they hadn’t been very persistent. They saw that I liked to drink and they backed away. Perhaps in other universities there were Muslims with greater evangelical zealotry, but not at Emory. The lack of a community meant that I met no Muslim girls who might have tempted me to learn something of Islam, perhaps as a courtship device.