“That leaves only one order of business,” I said.
Ali nodded. “Trail’s gone cold. Nothing on social media. Unless you want to get the authorities involved, I think you’re going to have to forget about her.”
“Damnit.”
“You really don’t know if she’s pregnant or not?”
“I don’t know anything,” I replied. “We haven’t been in touch since she sent me a picture of herself and ghosted.”
“What if she is?”
It was a question of heritage, wasn’t it? We new Americans — the ones who didn’t have the heft of generations behind us, who didn’t have great-grandfathers who had run ranches, or laid train tracks, or built dams, or died for this country in wars, or even thirsted their way through droughts and dust bowls — had only one way of mooring ourselves to the country. Through reproduction. To hasten the process of generation-building as much as possible. So if Candace was pregnant with my child, even if the child was illegitimate, I would want her to go through with it, and I would keep her secret and keep her provided for, and one day Marie-Anne would just have to understand how important all this was to me. We all had to make sacrifices for me to be fully American.
I conveyed all this to Ali in broken sentences. He mulled it over for a moment.
“If this whole thing is about children, aren’t you better off having children with your wife? She’s white and everything.”
“She won’t have them.”
“She won’t have them? Or won’t have them with you?”
I pressed my finger on the edge of a knife. It was too late to reel back the discussion. “I want to say it’s the former. But it could be the latter.”
“Well,” he said after a drawn-out pause, “what if she doesn’t want to have children with you because of who you are? Maybe she fears that her children will be stained by your existence. They would have a name like yours. And even if they didn’t, they would still resemble you. It isn’t a hospitable country for people who look like us. And it won’t be that much better for children who are only half sand-nigger.”
“I haven’t wanted to think like that.”
“It’s not pleasant.”
“You’re saying my wife is racist.”
“I’m not saying that,” he replied. “She did marry you, after all. But you guys were young when you married. You were driven by passion. Even her parental disapproval didn’t make her pause. But you guys are old now. Cautious. She’s had years to work through the passion. Maybe when she thinks of you in a cold and rational manner she sees all the struggles you’ve had and just doesn’t feel comfortable passing them on to her children. This is why, I think, I’ll probably end up marrying a Muslim girl. She will know exactly what she’s getting into with me. Even a convert has a better idea than a non-Muslim.”
I tried to play his comments off with a joke, saying I never thought I’d hear Ali Ansari — porn magnate, player, dandy — talk about marriage. But that was just the surface conversation. The inner one was directed toward home. Could it be that all this time, while I thought that Marie-Anne was cursed from the inside, she thought I was cursed from the outside? If her mother, despite all her work on behalf of civil rights in South Carolina, could find reasons to object to me, why couldn’t Marie-Anne, despite having married me, develop reasons to be wary of me? Was that why I wouldn’t produce a successor to put into America?
“What about Candace?”
Ali heard my inner cry. He came and sat next to me. “You’re going to have to forget her.” His face was composed, almost stern. It wasn’t advice; it was admonishment.
“Why?”
“Because she deserves better. She deserves someone who doesn’t need validation from the Old South to feel American. Someone that knows how to be a new American, this dirty and muddy mix that America is today. With presidents who are East African and celebrities who aren’t WASPS. This new America isn’t for you. Maybe it was because of where you grew up, but you can’t separate being American from being white. I thought you might be able to change. That was why I introduced you to GCM and told Farkhunda to suck your cock. But you can’t change. You can’t embrace your dispossession. The love of the plantation is too deep in you. You need to focus on Marie-Anne and forget about Candace. Don’t turn her into your little concubine. Let her go find someone who is comfortable in the fields. This is the age of the field Negro. You just stay in the house.”
I tucked my hands in my lap and nodded. Ali helped me delete the texts. He also pressured me to delete her phone number, as well as the picture she had sent. Afterward, we replayed the video of him threatening to kill George Gabriel and had a little chuckle over it. He asked me to delete it too. I told him I would; but not yet. I couldn’t let go of all my good memories in one session.
As we headed out of the restaurant I asked Ali if he needed money for the cab ride home. He declined, saying that he was going to get picked up.
I was too melancholy to wait around to see how he got home.
* * *
With Marie-Anne out of the country, I made a harder turn toward work. I sent Mahmoud a series of messages and waited for an answer. It took some time before I got a callback. He said he was in Philadelphia for a meeting. “Come and eat some steak with me,” he invited. “On me.”
I headed out on foot. It was fall, nearly winter. Something portended a hard frost. I looked out at the junipers and maples and oaks and firs. They twisted and touched each other all year long. But while the evergreens stayed clothed and warm the whole time, the seasonal trees had their clothes torn off and were made to suffer a frozen death. When you observed nature comparatively like that, you got a different message than the greeting-card one about the circle of life. You got one about the permanent superiority of one group over another.
We had decided to meet up at a steakhouse in Center City. I knew Mahmoud only had an issue with my eating habits in front of other Muslims. Since none were around I went ahead and ordered pulled pork and wine. I smiled at his disinterest. We were beginning to develop workplace customs. This was the kind of relationship I had wanted with George Gabriel.
The meal was mostly Mahmoud talking. He didn’t have a moment to just genuflect, to relax, to give in to the lethargy and boredom that might bedraggle others. This was really the first time I had been alone with him, and I tried to make an effort to get to know him. Family? Children? Permanent residence? He was agnostic about all those things. Like bees around a hive, his thoughts, his comments, always seemed to circle back to the question of how to most effectively present the case for America to the world at large, particularly to the Muslims who didn’t seem to buy into it. “They must be made to see,” he liked to say, “what we already know about ourselves.” He treated this project like it was a mission, like a celibate man who has been trained his whole life to do a singular thing, as if the slightest mismanagement would bring cataclysms raining down. I wanted to know what motivated him. Was it like me, a generalized adoration of the founding principles of the Republic, or was it something else, perhaps some irascible character flaw, such as the need to be liked, or perhaps some hidden scarring that he kept bottled? But he gave nothing away. He was as tight as his black skullcap.
After the meal we went for a walk in the direction of the Federal Courthouse, circling around Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, toward the National Public Radio building. I looked in the direction where Candace had projected the verse from the Koran. I didn’t bother telling Mahmoud about the performance and my subsequent response to it; he didn’t need proof of my loyalties.
We sat on a bench and stared through the windows where a radio host was chatting with a guest. It was like a silent film. Depending on the kind of music added to the background, the host and the guest could be made into anything. Perhaps that was how it was for most of us. We were noiseless things defined mostly by what played behind us, and we had never figured out how to make our own music.