I did find a great deal of delight in seeing this sort of docility in Mark. When he had first gotten hired to our team he had completely sidelined Candace and me, refusing to answer our e-mails for unreasonable periods, while taking himself straight to Dinesh’s office to discuss all our ideas as his own. Dinesh started to think that the new employee was simply more talented than the known quantities he used to work with, and appointed him our supervisor. Before long I ended up getting called into Dinesh’s office, where Mark told me the news about the Special Projects assignment. Candace had survived, largely because Mark said that it was good for male morale to have a pretty female to look at.
Mark came back with a bottle of Chimay. He thrust it into my hand and backpedaled. I was disappointed not to get some of the Blanc, but there was nothing I could say.
“Just curious,” George said after sloshing and gargling his first sip and letting out a satisfied moan. “What’s that? Up on the empty shelf?”
I shrugged. “Nothing?”
“No, there’s something. All the way to the back. Can you not see it? It’s something on a stand.”
I had always thought that was just the dusty shelf in the house, the empty one, the one too far to reach, the one that, when I cleaned, I made a little halfhearted flip of a towel at, and that was that.
I got on my toes and then made a pair of desperate hops. My eyes fell upon something, a small X-shaped wooden stand with something multicolored resting upon it. I waited for George to recognize that I wasn’t tall enough to grasp it; but he didn’t move until I verbally requested his assistance. “Please?”
“Yes, sure,” he said, pretending that he hadn’t noticed my struggle.
He took a long sip from his glass. Then, with a casual sweep, he brought the colored object off the wooden stand and handed it to me.
It was a little palm-sized item, wrapped in a glittery pink cloth cover. I put my beer on the shelf and inspected it. The pouch bore my name in green thread. The stitching reminded me of the way my mother used to identify the inside of my golf uniform back in high school in Alabama. I grew nervous. Since she had passed away, this was my first encounter with something that I knew had touched her hands.
George, gleeful at the thought of a new discovery in someone else’s home, leaned in and blew at the dusty pouch. There was a book inside.
I assisted him by swiping my hand over the cloth. Then, with a deep breath, I put forefinger and middle finger into the pouch and pulled at the book. I hadn’t so much as touched the calligraphic arabesques on the spine when I figured out what it was. And rather than pulling it out, I stuffed it deeper and prepared to launch myself up and put it back on the shelf.
“What is it?” George whispered, lowering his head like a giraffe in search of water.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. Just something my mother must have put there the last time she visited.”
“How classic. So what is it?”
“Nothing exciting,” I said. “Just a miniature Koran in a pouch. She came here for the last time after my dad passed away and before she left us. I guess she had nothing to do but stitch and sew this cover.”
I thought that upon being told that both my parents were dead, George would adopt an attitude of condolence, of reluctance, become a little less excited. But he had no such inclination. He thrust his wine glass into my hand and yanked out the Koran. Then, with his mouth still full of the Blanc, he ruffled the pages with a slide of his thumb. He wiped it on his pants, licked his middle finger, and browsed through a few more pages. His fingers seemed to discover the ribbon bookmark and he flipped toward the end of the volume. “Chapter 74,” he said out loud. “The Hidden Secret.” He looked at me, popped his eyebrows a couple of times, and then went back to skimming. At last he closed the Koran, inspected it, and handed it back. It was in his possession no more than fifteen seconds.
I didn’t know what to say. I avoided George’s gaze. I took back the Koran, slid it into the pouch, and moved to place it back atop the shelf.
As I got on my toes, I heard George chuckle behind me. “You’re putting something higher than Nietzsche?”
“It’s just a decoration.” I came back down and dusted my hands.
“Are you sure it’s not an expression of your residual supremacism?”
I turned into a pillar of salt. “Pardon?”
“I’m just noting,” he said, both hands up, but with a smile on his face, “that without thinking, you put the collected works of Muhammad above the collected works of Nietzsche. A theist over an antitheist. The Prophet of Arabia over the Devil of Bavaria. I’m just asking if that was an expression of some residual supremacism on behalf of the Koran.”
“I didn’t mean anything by putting it where I put it. I just put it.”
“That’s my point,” he persisted. “You did it without even thinking.”
“It’s just a decoration, George,” I said. “And besides, if I was thinking of anything, it was of my late mother.”
He became apologetic, returning to the inquisitive and empathetic person he had been earlier, when he had been kneading my shoulder. I felt his firm hands on my back again, this time a little lower than before. “Hey, cheers,” he said, offering his glass. “To matriarchs.”
He appeared genuine. There was a glimmer of gentle warmth in his eyes. I nodded with a smile and clinked, leading him away from the bookshelf. We briefly discussed what we most missed about our mothers and grandmothers. His mother had left him when he was a teenager and his grandmother had died during the bombing in Dresden. He said she deserved it; she had been an avid Nazi.
As the night went on, people became increasingly drunk, and the frostiness outside kept the party going. In her drunken state, Danielle declared half the firm to be anti-Semitic and revealed that her love of Jews began as a result of a tryst with Woody Allen. We had a good time cross-examining her and revealing the story to be hokum.
As for George, once he was properly drunk, he sidled up to Marie-Anne and asked her probing questions about where she had grown up and what she did for work. She managed to keep him at half an arm’s length, and yet he was wound up in her like a comb in her hair.
I moved aside with Candace Cooper. When I put my hand on her waist she downed the wine like a shot. Dabbing her mouth with the back of her wrist she tried to lock eyes with me. But she separated her mouth from the skin too quickly and there was a little runoff of wine down her arm, into her sleeve. She was about to say something when Dinesh appeared and took her away by the arm. I bubbled in anger at the ease with which she was swept away. She always had a tendency to let people strong-arm her.
Marie-Anne saw me standing alone and came over to hold my hand, encouraging me to take in the scene, telling me of a job well done, running her middle finger down the center of my palm to indicate her approval. Whenever we organized a party and it went well, she tended to want to play. It had something to do with having expressed Southern hospitality perfectly, the satisfaction of having done something that would have made her mother happy. I asked her about the bleeding. She said that the success of the party had improved her mood and things were under control.
My eyes stayed on George Gabriel. He walked to Candace and pulled her out of the conversation with Dinesh and led her toward the window. I willed for her to resist him but she did not.
I turned to Marie-Anne and smiled, doing whatever I could to not look at the bookshelf looming behind her. Every time my eyes went toward the top shelf, I redirected my gaze to a picture of Marie-Anne playing volleyball in college. Her youthful beauty was the only thing in the room that could prevent me from spinning into the hole that George Gabriel had opened.