31 Hours (7 page)

Masoud talked a lot about self-deception and the falseness of what was generally considered reality. And souls—Jonas’s soul, primarily. It turned out that talking religion endlessly was not unlike smoking weed; intense, heady, exacting, and finally exhausting. The process had strengthened Jonas’s convictions. Perhaps he’d even become addicted to it in some way because now, given the final hours to be alone and settle his own mind, he felt—like a physical pressure at the base of his throat—the sharp desire for another looping dialogue with Masoud.

He began heading uptown. Bringing awareness to each precious step, he noticed how his arms and legs moved in effortless symmetry, as if in time to a nursery rhyme. One began to run through his head:
London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling
. . . Maybe he would walk until all the anger drained away and he wearied, and then he would
take the subway back downtown toward the studio apartment. Or hop a taxi if he felt like it. When Masoud took Jonas’s wallet, he gave Jonas fifty bucks, like an allowance, which Jonas had in his back pocket now. At this point, why save money? Masoud had called it his emergency fund, but the irony of that almost made Jonas laugh, even at the time. The only real emergency was the one Jonas would trigger, and then miss.

He saw a woman ahead of him pausing in front of a store, the only person he’d seen hesitating on the street this morning. She was digging in a big leather purse, and when she lifted her head, he stopped short. It was his mother. God, what horrible, clumsy timing; what would he say? He felt a mounting panic.

But only for a second did she look like his mother, and then she glanced down the street, meeting his eyes, and she looked nothing like his mother, who was more fine-boned and favored flowing, rainbow-colored clothes, and besides, had reddish hair these days.

Jake and Carol. Carol and Jake. When they were young, Jonas’s parents must have been something. They must have thought the very linking of their names was a prayer. They were, he imagined, so juicy once. He envisioned his mom, the bohemian potter busy at her wheel, his father, the struggling painter before the canvas, the two of them breaking from work to meet in a collision of limbs and laughter.

Jonas had a vague childhood memory of some late-night giggling between them. He remembered the curve of his mother’s arm embracing both father and son. He remembered sitting at the wooden table with his father, eating slices of his mother’s whole-grain bread and listening to her sing while she showered in the bathroom off the kitchen. Jake and Carol. Hippies trying to grow up in their own way.

But most of that had faded by the time he was five or six. What he
remembered then was the mood in his house transitioning from steamy to sterile, which was a loss but manageable, and then to nasty, which was not. In the black period, Jonas’s Sunday mornings were punctuated by the sound of yelling and the scent of bacon, which his mother said his father cooked because she hated the smell, which may have been true, since two or three strips invariably ended up in the trashcan, uneaten. After several months, the yelling gave away to a silence that vibrated, that seemed to him briefly hopeful before it was replaced by sentences that began, “Well, your
father
believes . . .” or “Your
mother
thinks . . .” Differences Jonas hadn’t even known about, seemingly significant but in ways he couldn’t understand, emerged in discussions that each of them had with him alone. His mother, it turned out, loved to read, while his father gravitated toward theater. His father longed to see Venice, and his mother wanted to return to Paris. His mother was a committed atheist, his father the son of Hasidic Jews. Who had known all this mattered?

Not long afterward, his father vanished from their Upper West Side apartment in one last spasm of yelling, and by the time Jonas was ten, his father owned a gallery on Lexington Avenue, with large paintings that seemed to have been thrown on the ivory walls in haste. The haphazard charm of the gallery soon attracted a throng of unconventional young art-lovers. The paintings were not by his father, as Jonas thought when he first saw them, but by artists his father represented in his new incarnation. “Up-and-coming” was the phrase his father used. His father said he did not want to paint anymore, and though both son and ex-wife understood this to be a lie, it was not discussed.

The artists whose works hung in his father’s gallery were of various ages and backgrounds, but the paintings themselves held an eerie similarity.
In fact, from the beginning, walking around the gallery, Jonas could boil down his father’s taste in art quite simply: whatever the frame held must have curvy lines and lots of red. Which Jonas’s mother noticed, too, and somehow interpreted as a sign of materialistic misogyny, a phrase Jonas didn’t even understand but which caused his father to explode: “Ridiculous!” and led to their last and most virulent argument. “You say idealism like it’s a swear word now,” Jonas remembered his mother shouting. After that, they stopped speaking altogether.

During this period, the boy Jonas began to get it.
You can be anything you want to be,
his parents told him, but they lied. Truth was, an enormous breach existed between one’s ambitions and one’s reality. “Sellout” was a term he was still too young to know, but he began to get the general idea. His mother continued to throw pots and teach pottery classes, but it took the help of child support to keep them in their rent-controlled two-bedroom. His father occasionally showed up in society photographs, holding a glass of champagne, and his gallery remained trendy. Jonas had the sense that one was successful and the other not, but he regularly changed his mind about which parent fell into which category.

He was also a bit stunned, during the months of divorcing, by the speed with which one could go from being part of a unit to being an individual human quite insistently separate. He later thought that if only his parents had been able to wait until he was a teenager, eager for detachment, it might have been easier on him. He might not have had the sense of betraying both of them even as they betrayed him. But by the time of the burned bacon, Jonas was already well beside the point for Carol and Jake. Just as, he guessed, Vic’s little sister was beside the point now. He felt for Mara; he knew—better than Vic, he suspected—
that she was having a hard time right now. He would have visited Mara once or twice more over the last few weeks if there’d been time. If things had been different.

The woman who’d reminded him of his mother had walked on, but Jonas had been standing long enough to turn cold again, so he slipped into a pharmacy and wandered up and down the artificially-lit aisles, thinking and not thinking. Images floated by: the agitated man on the bicycle outside the Peshawar madrassa, the bearded one in the training camp who’d cut a sheep’s neck to prove he would not shy from necessary violence. Masoud instructing him, a hand resting on his shoulder. His mother’s expression when she looked worried, his father’s corny jokes. Vic, of course. Vic, with her muscular thighs and her endearing habit of touching her tongue to her upper lip when concentrating. He gave each memory and every thought a nodding but passing acknowledgment as he distracted himself by reading the backs of drugstore products, dropping some into his cart.

Then he went to the cash register and paid for the items he’d collected. He left with a packet of razors, a pair of tweezers, some nail clippers, a package of college-rule loose-leaf, a set of three blue pens, two postcards showing the Manhattan skyline, a box of business-sized envelopes, two chocolate bars, some juice, tape, a magazine, mouthwash, Saltine crackers, and first-aid cream. On his way out, he stopped at a stamp machine and bought half-a-dozen stamps, each one adorned with the image of the American flag.

NEW YORK: 1:04 P.M.
MECCA: 9:04 P.M.

At the Broadway-Lafayette stop, Vic exited and climbed to the street. On frigid days, she thought, the city’s inequalities stood out in sharp relief, and she found herself wondering how Sonny Hirt survived. Most panhandlers she’d come to know by sight over the years vanished when temperatures headed south. They went someplace, she supposed, where it was easier to be homeless in winter. Sonny always stayed.

“Shouldn’t you be in Florida?” she’d asked when she’d handed him a dollar earlier that day, and then she’d thought maybe the question was insensitive or he’d take offense, but Sonny had just smiled.

“You sure talking truth,” he said as he shuffled on.

And so he was still working the metro, and probably would be for many hours, while she was rushing home to a warm cup of tea, warm shower, warm food. This was the kind of disparity that could set Jonas to ranting. He always felt distant problems as if they were his own, and while she could admire that, ranting was not her favorite thing about Jonas. She believed she was helping him mellow. But she suspected she was in direct competition with someone she barely knew. Jonas didn’t talk about Masoud a lot, but every time he did, his admiration was obvious. She’d met Masoud once in an Italian restaurant. She listened to him speak eloquently about his home in Saudi Arabia, nights spent in the dry, crisp desert around the city, gathered with family or friends
inside an open tent or sometimes outside under cloudless skies on a thick carpet, eating rice and lamb with his hands from an oversized platter shared by all. After the meal, the men played cards under the moon until the muezzin’s call to morning prayer. If they couldn’t make it to the mosque in time, they would stop by the roadside to pray. He made it sound romantic, timeless, and she watched Jonas’s face grow more entranced as he listened to the stories.

Masoud also mentioned his older brother, who went to western Afghanistan in October 2001 to help the wounded and was killed ten days later when American rockets hit a military hospital. “My brother was a gentle and conciliatory man,” Masoud said. “His life was dismissed as collateral damage.” The edge of fury in his voice convinced Vic that Masoud encouraged a self-righteous, moody part of Jonas she hoped he’d outgrow.

Vic’s investment in what Jonas would become was, of course, new. The camping trip changed everything. The sex had been surprising after all those years of friendship, and awkward, too, not because they were inside a tent but because they were doing it at all, touching one another in these ways.
This is Jonas
, she kept reminding herself, pausing to brush his familiar face and hands and then, like a blind woman, reaching for his unfamiliar inner thigh and the place where the small of his back had always disappeared into his jeans. She imagined he must have had the same confusing, thrilling sensation. After that first time, their lovemaking grew to feel different on different occasions. Sometimes she experienced it as a journey and lost all sense of time or place. Often it was tender. Once it was excitingly rough.

Now, on the street, she wiped her left palm on her jeans and rolled her shoulders back. Her legs were sore from the long rehearsal hours. Alex had been driving them so hard over the past week that she’d nearly
lost contact with the outside world, with everything except her own dancing limbs and the members of the company. She imagined Jonas in her apartment, hopefully in just a few hours’ time. She would put on an old Tina Turner CD, low—
I’m your private dancer
—and stretch him out on his back and dive her fingernails into his collarbone. Then she’d draw them gently over his chest, skirt his thighs, and move them down to the soles of his feet, like finger-painting. Imagining each finger a different shade, long strips of wavy color, all the while taking in the texture of his skin with her own. She would turn him over then and do it on the other side. Deep inside her, something coiled in anticipation.

She exhaled a puff of air made visible by the cold and experienced the deep, private happiness of knowing that in a few minutes, she would be standing in a stream of hot water, massaging her muscles with lavender-scented soap, feeling aches slide off her body. Preparing for Jonas, as she thought of it. Purifying for Jonas.

Turning the corner, she saw a woman standing on her stoop, arms crossed over her chest against the cold. Jonas’s mom: that was who it looked like. But it couldn’t be; what would she be doing here? Vic’s fantasies about Jonas were making her imagine parts of him everywhere.

As Vic got closer, though, the woman waved, and Vic saw that it
was
Jonas’s mom, which she immediately decided was a strange coincidence. Jonas’s mom would never come to visit Vic—Vic doubted Jonas’s mom even knew where she lived. She must be here to see someone else, someone in Vic’s building, and what a fluke, here came Vic.

But no. Jonas’s mom was striding toward her, one hand reaching out, saying, “Vic, hi, hon, sorry for the intrusion, I was hoping to catch you; do you have a few minutes?” For some reason, those words sent fear shooting through Vic’s body, and even as Jonas’s mother was in
midsentence, Vic was interrupting: “Is Jonas okay? He’s all right, isn’t he, Mrs. Meitzner?” and before Vic could finish speaking, Jonas’s mother was answering, “Carol, honey, I’m just Carol, surely, after all this time, heck, I’m not even married to Mr. Meitzner anymore, and yes, Jonas is fine, at least I think so, I mean, nothing’s happened, nothing specific, but that’s what I want to talk with you about.”

Vic was so startled she couldn’t even think of how to respond properly, and then she realized they were still on the street, where it continued to be frigid, and then she wondered how messy her place was—Mrs. Meitzner kept a neat apartment, she knew—but how could she even think of that? How many times over the years, during high school and beyond, had Mrs. Meitzner welcomed her, made her dinner, even insisted that Jonas walk her home if it got too late?

“Come on in,” Vic said. “Yes, please. I’m just surprised. I didn’t even know that you knew my address—”

“Your mom . . . I called . . .”

Vic unlocked the first door to the building, and then the second door, and Mrs. Meitzner followed her up three flights, and Vic unlocked the apartment door and flung it open to the living room, which wasn’t too cluttered, a pair of boots by the door, a plate, a coffee cup and a partially read newspaper on the floor in front of the couch, two wineglasses on a table to the side, and a small pile of clothes in the corner. “What can I get you to drink, Mrs. Meitzner? I have some herbal tea?”