Was that really cynicism? Jibril had thought so, and perhaps he was right.
In Libya, Zawiya was in rebel hands, while in nearby Tripoli Gadhafi was giving families four hundred dollars apiece and announcing to the world that the Libyan people had his back. His handsome, well-spoken son, Seif al-Islam, was doing interviews with Western news outlets, looking very in control as his country was torn apart, explaining that those fighting against the government had been given hallucinogenic drugs and were being controlled by al Qaeda.
Had he made it through, Jibril would probably have been in Zawiya by then, plotting his infiltration through government lines into Tripoli. Squinting at the television, clutching his empty glass, John thought that for all his foolishness Jibril had been a brave man, more so than he could ever hope to be.
No, bravery wasn’t the point, and Jibril had tried to make that clear to him. The point was responsibility. As you knock around through your days you acquire other people, and with them come commitments. Eventually, as the weight of those responsibilities grows, you reach a point of no return, and a man could be measured by what he did at that moment. Either he faced his new commitments or he fled. John’s father had fled before his first birthday. Jibril had been so tied to his commitments that he had abandoned the newer responsibilities of fatherhood in order to deal with the old ones. And John? Fatherhood had been his primary commitment, yet he’d gone to Cy Gallagher at Global Security, asking to be taken away from his broken family, which had grown too heavy to bear.
Which was why he woke on Sunday with the conviction—his first conviction in a while—that it was time to straighten a few things out. He hadn’t called his kids in weeks, and he committed to doing so in the evening, once they were awake and had had their breakfast. In the meantime he would clean himself up. He shaved and showered and brushed his teeth, then made strong coffee and cooked scrambled eggs. After washing the dishes, he called Geert and told him that he would be happy to meet with some of his Egyptian clients looking to improve their English, because part of getting your life together is getting hold of your finances. Geert was ecstatic.
He went to work on the apartment, picking up bottles and bagging oily paper bags and takeout tins, then opened all the windows and got down to vacuuming. He even used damp paper towels to wipe the dust off of everything, amazed and disgusted by how much he picked up. He found books in the strangest places, and behind the hamper came across one in a Zip-loc bag—a collector’s item, a 1920 printing of T. S. Eliot’s Ara Vos Prec. It had been a gift from Maribeth when she discovered that the big black soldier she’d slept with was an avid reader of the old poets. John took it out of the bag gingerly, its heavy paper tinted and stiff, and opened it to a random page, reading:
Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours.
He sat down and read through the whole poem slowly, realizing that “Gerontion” was the source of the verse that had come to him while waiting for the Libyan undertaker: In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas …
He slipped it back into the bag and onto the bookshelf. Then he collected the three heavy trash bags and carried them down to the Dumpster in the street. By then it was two in the afternoon. He was doing so well. He could see the rest of the day—reading, he thought, would be a proper way to spend his time. He wanted to get back to the Eliot, and since arriving in Cairo he’d set down three novels around the thirty-page mark; it was time to finish at least one of them. He would call Kelli and Ray, and then, once dark had fallen, he would get rid of Jibril Aziz’s secret list, finally washing his hands of that mess. A gift for the Nile, and a clean break for him.
Talking to his kids was supposed to make him feel together, to pull him back into the world of human relations. He said all the right words, the ones that are written in the encyclopedia of civil society. He asked about their friends, their classes, and how good they were being. He asked what books they enjoyed, what movies, what they’d had for breakfast. He was unpracticed, but they were generous with him, and like always he wondered why he didn’t call them every day.
Afterward, Danisha came on and asked when they should expect to see him next. “A month, give or take,” he said, and she hummed quietly.
After the final, tumultuous year of watching, helpless, as their marriage fractured and crumbled, the divorce itself had been an amicable affair. There had been no getting away from the fact that they cared about each other, and the addition of children had meant that, no matter how bad it got between them, there would be two tethers mooring them to one another unto death. John’s bank made the automated alimony payments to her account, and so their only issue of contention was his absence. “They need to know their father’s around,” she’d told him numerous times. “It’s hard on them.” To which he always pointed out that they had Owen. “It’s not the same,” she said of her new husband, and when she said this he always thought about the kids he’d seen in Nairobi and Lisbon and Kandahar who had lost both their parents and, in some cases, entire extended families. He always wanted to tell her about these children, but he’d never become unhinged enough to make that mistake.
Now, she said, “Try to call more often, okay? It gives them a glow.”
Really? he wanted to ask. A call from a man they hadn’t seen in more than half a year? A man they only saw on off-weekends even when he was in town? Did he really mean that much to them?
Were we all really that young once?
So he agreed, as he always did, to call more often.
Dusk was falling as he hung up, cooling off the city, and he stared at his newly cleaned home, wondering if it was all just a facade—or if (and this with hope) it was the facade that would eventually make his reality. Only one thing left to do, and he went to the kitchen to get Jibril’s book. As he was reaching up to the cookie jar, someone buzzed from the street. He pressed the intercom button and heard Maribeth. “I was sitting around Deals wondering where I could find a good time.”
2
In the morning Maribeth wandered in, sipping at a coffee, as he was brushing his teeth. She’d found one of his long shirts; she wore it well. “Want some culture tonight? Derek’s showing some of his abstract messes.”
Derek was a hippie acquaintance from New Jersey. “Not sure,” John said as he rinsed off his toothbrush.
“Afraid of making this regular?”
He watched her in the hazy mirror, watched how she pulled back the corner of her lip in a sly smile. What was there not to like about Maribeth Winter, really? Attractive and intelligent, with a biting sense of humor. And while she’d been through enough troubled relationships to know better, for some inexplicable reason she liked him. But was all this enough to sustain something more than the occasional one-night fling?
Before the marriage and divorce he wouldn’t have asked himself such questions: He would have allowed the pleasure of her company to dictate his actions. But he was older now, old enough to know better than to trust his romantic instincts. God sure didn’t make me very wise. The idea of taking responsibility for yet another person was terrifying. “I’m here for another month,” he said. “Then I’m gone. Starting something now just seems self-defeating.”