BUT THERE WERE flames in my stomach, and now, after dinner, I sit upon my widow’s walk at the new table under the umbrella looking down over the rooftops and streets of Corona to the gray fog that enshrouds the beach and the sea. It is two or more hours to nightfall. I drink hot tea, strong from brewing in the samovar since morning, and I can hear my wife in the house below washing dishes in the kitchen sink. The sky and ocean are so gray and white as to be inseparable. I sit and think. I must weigh my options regarding this Kathy Nicolo, but my hand trembles, my mind roaming elsewhere, to Jasmeen, my cousin, who was nineteen years old and very beautiful. Her voice was low for a woman, but her body was long and thin, her hair quite thick and black, and when she thought something was humorous she would laugh without reservation, letting her teeth and bright eyes be seen by anyone. But she had an affair with an American oil executive, who they say was rich and quite handsome. She committed this in a townhouse which one of her own neighbors cleaned three times per week. Soon, all the village women knew she had given her girl’s flower away without marriage, without the blessing of God and the holy mosque, and to a married foreigner from the west. And it took a full month for the news to reach her father, my uncle, and her two brothers. My uncle was a trader in carpets, though not highly successful, while his only brother, my father, was a respected lawyer who would one day become a judge. When my uncle finally heard the gossip of the old khanooms, he did not believe it, but Jasmeen was not capable of telling lies well and so he knew it was the truth and he beat her. For two weeks he kept her locked in the home. He began to drink vodka nightly, at first with the neighborhood men, but he could not bear their silence so he drank alone, usually at his shop in the back room where the carpets hung from the walls or were stacked in long rolls in all four corners. My uncle rolled his own cigarettes and I imagined him smoking his black Turkish tobacco and drinking in the stillness and quiet of his office, the walls threatening to collapse upon him. He would return home very late, often in the early morning, pull Jasmeen from her bed, and beat her with his fists, crying, “Gendeh! Whore!” My aunt would sometimes attempt to stop him, but he would beat her as well, calling her, “Modar gendeh! Mother whore!”
On the first morning of the third week, his eldest son, Mahmood, returned home from the bazaar after having overheard five market women speak of the Behrani family, of the shame their kaseef daughter had brought upon their heads. It was a cold winter morning, and my uncle had not yet left for his shop. He sat by the woodstove with his tea and bread, though he took neither; he had once again not slept through the night and was still mast, drunk. My aunt had left the home early with Mahmood and she was at the bazaar, while my cousin Kamfar, the youngest child, sat at the wooden table with his morning’s schoolwork, and it was his brother who rushed into Jasmeen’s room and pulled her out. She was dressed in long white nightclothes, her hair loose and wild upon her shoulders, her small face bruised and swelled from the beatings. He brought her before their father and yelled he must do something. The family is disgraced, Bawbaw! We are all disgraced, because of this stinking GENDEH! Jasmeen struggled with her brother, cursing him, but he would not release her, and my uncle looked away from his son and daughter and stared into the fire as if he could not hear or see or smell anything around him. At last he stood. He left the room, and returned with his German-made Luger pistol. Jasmeen was still attempting to free herself from Mahmoud’s hands, but when she saw her father and his gun she began to scream until it seemed she could not breathe. She began to cry Kamfar’s name, but when he stood, his father pointed the gun and ordered him to stay seated. He took Jasmeen by the hair, and with his eldest son’s help, dragged her outdoors.
The ground was frozen but there was no snow. The house was only a short walk to the village square, and one could see the long bread and trinket tables of the bazaar, a cage of chickens, the butcher’s meat hanging from a timber. Already passersby stopped to view the spectacle of the carpet dealer pointing a pistol at his dirty kaseef daughter whose hands were held behind her by her bearded older brother who stood to the side, his eyes on the eyes of their father. The girl was in white nightclothes, her feet bare, already beginning to turn blue, her black hair hanging before her face as she cried so hard she was unable to speak. The men and women of the bazaar began to look as well, and perhaps they saw the youngest son run from the house just as his father pulled the trigger, the sound like the cracking of ice, a wisp of smoke entering the air, and the young beautiful Jasmeen, the gendeh, the whore, falling to the ground, curling herself up as if she were cold, moaning, then becoming quiet and with great concentration sitting up and pressing her hands to the hole in her chest. But in seconds the front of her gown was completely red and wet, and quite soon she lay still, her eyes open, steam rising from her wound into the early-morning air of Tabriz.
I hated my uncle, believing he had acted rashly and with too much passion. We are an educated family; we do not need to live as the peasant class, resolving our troubles with spilled blood. My aunt took Kamfar and moved to her family in the south, to Bandar Abbas, on the Strait of Hormuz. But none of her brothers or uncles would take revenge on Jasmeen’s killer. A man has the right, even the obligation, to protect his family name. Many years later, when I was married and Esmail was not yet born, Kamfar told to me the details of the story while we were mast with Russian vodka, and we both wept for Jasmeen. Soraya was a girl of eight or nine years and in my drunkenness I could not allow myself to even imagine raising merely an unloaded pistol to her. And over the years I have dreamed of Jasmeen in white falling to the ground, Mahmood standing over her as she attempted in vain to keep life from leaving her, pressing her hands to the torn opening between her breasts.
The hurting of women I have not approved of, though, yes, I have struck my wife on occasion, but I regretted each incident deeply. Once at our home in Tehran, I slapped Nadi’s face for raising her voice to me in the presence of a junior officer. Her eyes filled with sadness and humiliation and she ran crying from the room. Later that evening, when she would still to me not speak, I rolled up my shirtsleeve, lighted a Turkish cigar, and pressed the glowing ash into my flesh. I wanted to cry out but did not. I relighted the cigar and burned myself again. I did this five times, and I asked God for forgiveness with each burning of the flesh. The white scar on my forearm remains, and it is a reminder to me for controlling my passion, but today, when this woman Kathy Nicolo assaulted my buyers and me from her automobile, when I felt the sale of the bungalow begin to slip past me like the wind, I wanted to shoot her in the head; for with each of her false accusations, she was attempting to take from me not simply my future, but my family’s food and water, our shelter, our clothes. I explained to the gentleman and lady that this was a crazy woman, she knows nothing of which she speaks; I am pleased to show you all the paperwork for the sale of this home; I am its proper owner. The man and woman regarded one another and then we spoke of other matters such as the proximity of the home to the beaches and San Francisco, the quiet nature of this street. The husband said they would telephone me with a decision, but I knew as I escorted them and the child to their family automobile, I had lost them.
Perhaps I should reconsider my decision to complete these dealings without a real estate agent. I have heard of many people who have put down payments upon homes after only viewing color photographs of the property in the Realtor’s office. This would allow me to not worry about this kaseef woman spoiling things.
But no, I cannot allow a salesman to take a heavy percentage of what is rightfully mine. I will wait for calls on the property and if this woman troubles me again, she will simply wish she had not. That is all. There is no more to consider.
MY VISIT TO BISGROVE STREET LEFT ME FEELING WORSE, LIKE I’D JUST fanned a fire I was trying to put out. I skipped the matinee and went food shopping instead, then drove south to the fish camp to surprise Les with some kind of meal when he showed up at seven, hopefully with some good lawyer news. It was only two-
thirty when I drove the Bonneville up the pine trail, but I couldn’t go very far because Lester’s Toyota station wagon was already parked there. In front of it was a red pickup truck and on the rear window was a faded LET GO AND LET GOD bumper sticker beneath a small trout-fishing decal.
I got out with my two bags of groceries and squeezed past the station wagon and truck, the pine branches messing up my hair. As I carried the groceries into the clearing, I saw Lester and a man on the front porch, though they hadn’t seen me yet; Lester was sitting in a cane chair against the wall, still in his uniform, looking down at the floor, a beer can in one hand. The man was leaning against the railing with his back to me and the woods. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue short-sleeved shirt, his arms thick. I stepped on a twig and Les raised his head, but for a half second his face didn’t change from what it was before; he looked at me like I was someone he didn’t know who had just walked in on something private. But then his face softened up and he stood and met me at the steps, taking a bag and kissing me on the cheek.
“You’re early,” I said.
“You too.” Les motioned to his big friend and introduced us. His name was Doug, and this was his camp. Doug smiled, nodded at me, and drank from a can of ginger ale, his wedding band catching my eye. His square fleshy face might’ve been good-looking if his head weren’t practically shaved. I noticed how big his chest and biceps were. He reminded me of a lot of men back East, and I didn’t like it. I followed Les inside with the groceries. He seemed skinnier than usual. I went over and hugged him. “You look pretty low. What’s up?”
He held me for a long quiet minute, then let go. “Carol’s real upset.”
I heard Doug step off the porch and walk away from the cabin, and I didn’t know what Lester was trying to say. I took the food from the bags, a sudden current in my chest.
Les looked out the screen door, at the trees on the other side, though he didn’t seem to see them. “She was waiting in the car with the kids when I got to work this morning, and she began shouting and crying. Hitting me. The kids were still in their pajamas and they were crying too. It was bad.”
I had that floating feeling again, my heart beating somewhere in the air in front of me. I started to fold an empty paper bag. Les stayed quiet and was putting a crease in a bag that was already creased. “Are you going back to her, Lester?”
“That’s not an option, Kathy.”
Why? I wanted to know. Because she would never take him back now anyway? Or because he was really committed to this new road he was on? This road with me? But there was an edge in his voice, like he could yell or cry or both if I pushed him, and I pictured his son and daughter in their pajamas crying in the car. I wanted to hold him, but I lit a cigarette instead, blew the smoke out the side of my mouth. “I’m sorry your kids had to be there. That must’ve been hard.”
“It was.” Les pushed open the screen door with his toe, his back to me. “I should go help Doug with his boat. He’s trading it in for something bigger.”
I inhaled deeply on my cigarette, then rested it on the very edge of the chopping block, balancing it there, a tremor in my fingers as I let all the heat out of my lungs. “Les?”
“Yeah?”
“This all would’ve happened anyway, wouldn’t it? If you hadn’t met me?”
He turned to me, like he was surprised I’d said that, his lips parted under his mustache. He let the screen door close behind him and came over and hugged me, told me of course it would, it was all going to happen sooner or later. He stepped back and looked at me with a hand on both my shoulders. “It’s not you, Kathy. It’s not you at all.”
I felt better but also left out, like a little sister, and I stepped away from him to finish my cigarette. “I know this is shitty timing, but did you get a chance to call your lawyers about the house?”
He said no, he hadn’t, but he was planning to do that before tonight. He came over and kissed me, tasting like sour beer, the way it gets old in the mouth. Then he said he’d drive up to Half Moon Bay right now and make the calls, be back in no time. I told him I was blocking them both in with my car and I handed him my keys as he stepped out into the gray light, ducking his head as he left the porch. I moved to the door and watched him walk to the river trail, his shoulders hunched slightly, his head low, like there was still something he had to duck.
I smoked a cigarette in the doorway while they carried the aluminum skiff through the clearing past our woodpile, then up the trail until I couldn’t see them anymore. I could hear Doug’s calm voice, and I wondered if they were talking about me. I wondered what Les had told him about us, and I pictured Doug and his wife having dinner with Lester and Carol Burdon. I felt like leaving, like getting in my car and driving for days and days. But Lester was taking my car anyway, and he was doing it to call lawyers for me. I sat at the table and looked around the cabin, at the bare pine walls, the black iron stove, the groceries on the wood chopping block, the steep staircase to the loft. I could hear the Purisima River through the trees. All this quiet was making me more nervous and I’d wished I’d brought my Walkman from the car. I went outside, squatted at the woodpile, and loaded myself up with a stoveful of split logs.
LES WAS GONE almost two hours, longer than it should’ve taken him to drive five miles to make a couple of phone calls. I’d bought two jars of marinara sauce, and I was planning to heat that up in the stove while I boiled some pasta and cooked hot Italian sausages in another pan. But I didn’t want to start any of this till Les got back, because on a hot stove it would all get done fast. So after finally getting the fire going, I tossed a three-green salad on two paper plates, peeled eight cloves of garlic, diced them with a dull knife, made half-slices in the French bread, then scooped in spoonfuls of margarine, sprinkling in the garlic before I wrapped the loaf in foil. I sat on the porch and smoked a cigarette. Any minute I kept expecting Les to come out of the woods into the clearing, but I sat there for close to an hour listening to the river, an occasional bird, the crackling of the fire in the house behind me. Every twenty minutes or so I’d go back inside to add a split log to the flames to keep the temperature of the stove-top up. There were only two pots and one pan in the crate under the stairs, and the pots were small. I’d filled both with clear water from the river and each had a slow boil going in it. I was going to have to cook the vermicelli in both, then dump the water to heat the sauce, hoping that and the sausages from the pan would be hot enough to reheat the cooled pasta, though I wasn’t too worried about anything cooling off in that cabin; it was hot as a sauna. My shirt was sticking to my skin and the sweat was beginning to burn my eyes. I poked the fire with a stick, shut the oven door, then walked down the short trail to the Purisima, where I pulled off my top and bra, stepped out of my shorts and panties, and waded out in the cold water and dived in.
It was a shock but I felt instantly cleansed to the bone, and I let myself surface, turning on my back and kicking until I was away from the treetops and there was nothing but the gray western sky above me. I closed my eyes and drifted a minute, but the water was cold and I didn’t know how deep it was and for some reason I pictured the fish camp on fire, tall flames curling out the windows, black smoke snaking out the shingles of the roof. I swam back to the mossy bank and dried myself as well as I could with my underwear. I dressed without them and walked back to the camp, which wasn’t burning, and there was Lester lugging my suitcase into the clearing from the cars. In his other hand was a covered Styrofoam cup of coffee he tried to drink from as he went, his dark eyes on the ground in front of him. When he saw me he swallowed and lowered his cup. “Go for a swim?”
“You get lost?” I reached for my suitcase but he stepped away with it. “Your foot.”
“It’s fine.” I tried to take the suitcase again, but he wouldn’t let go and he walked ahead of me while I stood there watching him make his unsteady way up onto the porch. He dropped my suitcase against the wall and sat down. I stayed where I was. “You go drinking??
??
Lester looked at me with his eyes narrowed a little, like he didn’t quite know how to take what I’d just said. But really, he seemed put out, as if I was interrupting an important train of thought. He flipped the plastic lid off his coffee cup and drank. I crossed my arms and stared at him, my wet underpants balled up in one hand. I was hurt he didn’t bring me a cup. I felt refreshed after my swim, and coffee would’ve been nice right then, before I cooked. I knew I could go inside and make some, though. And I couldn’t stand myself looking at him this way, my arms crossed, my head cocked. Why didn’t I just start tapping one foot?
I sat on the top step of the porch, my back against the post. Lester had both elbows on his knees, holding the coffee cup between his hands, and he gave me a weak smile, then looked over the railing into the woods. His uniform shirt was wrinkled and sweat-stained in the back, and his pant cuffs were riding high on his calves, his black socks fallen to his black shoes, his shins skinny and hairy. A rush of air seemed to go through me.
“You don’t have good news for me, do you?” I felt selfish asking this, and I wished I could take back the question. Lester studied me for a long minute, then shook his head.
“I don’t have good news for anybody, Kathy.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m just a Bad News Bear, Kathy.” He raised his eyebrows at me like it was my cue to laugh.
“Did you get loaded before the calls? Or after?”
Les stared at his small woodpile. “After. But I didn’t get loaded. I started to, but then Doug steered me away from it.” He looked over at me. “You’re so beautiful with your hair wet like that.”
I was thinking of Doug and the twelve-step, Higher Power bumper sticker on his truck, of letting go and letting God. “They can’t do anything to Bahroony, can they?”