Those Who Knew Read online

  That’s right, Lena said, reaching down for a crumbling edition of Simone Weil’s On the Abolition of All Political Parties. Simone, dear, we have not given up! Lena declared, frayed cotton balls flapping against her face as she whipped around.

  Olga punched her fist at the air and scanned the shelf for who else they might summon for their midday manifesto when she heard a voice saying her name with the thick accent of a northerner. She spun around to find Oscar in the doorway, the blond-as-butter baker who had come in Tuesday with the scones.

  Well, well, she said, look who’s come to join the revolution.

  * * *

  Revolution was not what Oscar had in mind when he walked into Olga’s Seek the Sublime or Die.

  It was her side enterprise, and perhaps some more poetry.

  Although this morning the main reason he’d come by was to give Olga the croissants he’d made for her as a thank you. Earlier in the week, he’d mentioned a Yeats poem to her that he’d been obsessed with in college and she had rummaged through a dozen stacks for an anthology she’d acquired years ago from another northerner. The anthology had indeed contained the Yeats poem, on a wrinkled page covered with water stains and someone else’s pencil marks. Still, the lines were as luminous as Oscar remembered them from the undergrad poetry seminar he’d taken before dropping out to go to culinary school.

  He’d gotten disillusioned with culinary school as well. Then with the vegan bakery he’d worked in after that.

  After nine years burning out in one job and city after another, endlessly dissatisfied, convinced there must be somewhere that would suit him better, he’d received a small inheritance from his step-grandmother and decided to blow the money on an extended wander in the cheaper countries south of his own.

  Or at least he had been wandering, until a bargain flight to the island had delivered him into the dilapidated bohemian labyrinth of this port city, and he’d gone no further. Its bright, joyful disorder felt so in sync with his own hapless internal state that he’d rented a room for a month in a hostel with a decent kitchen. He’d signed up for some cheap language classes to better grasp what was going on—how to reply, for example, when two drunk women in what looked like painted Santa beards asked if he’d come to join their revolution.

  I don’t know if I came for that, he said in their language.

  Oh, I think you did, comrade. Olga slapped him on the back and turned to her friend. This is the wandering baker I told you about, who came in with the scones and bought that anthology I’ve been trying to unload for a hundred years.

  Her friend had yanked off her beard as soon as Oscar walked in. She was shorter and a good twenty years younger than Olga, who was nearly his own height and broader in the shoulders than he was. Next to Olga, her friend looked somewhat childlike. She had a delicate, chiseled face but there was something ferocious about her, too—a scrutiny of the world so intense it bordered on sensual. He blushed as he watched her take in the batik pants he’d bought the week before at an artisan fair and his faded, decade-old T-shirt from college.

  This Place Is Gorges, she said, reading the front of his shirt out loud. Is that supposed to be funny? Doesn’t gorge mean a deep divide?

  Oscar nodded and, in halting, nervous sentences, tried to explain about the other “gorgeous” in his language, which meant beautiful, his freckles heating on his face.

  Gorges and gorgeous—there’s a word for that corny kind of joke in your country, isn’t there? A pun, right? I certainly got an overload of those living with you people. Puns, and guns! Olga shouted in his language, lurching drunkenly in his direction. That pretty much sums up your nation, wouldn’t you say, Oscar—puns and guns? But more than puns, what would really give this revolution a boost would be some of those scones of yours.

  Would croissants do? Oscar pulled them out, still warm inside the paper towels he’d wrapped around them in his hostel. I made them to thank you for the anthology.

  I believe these will do just fine. Olga snatched two and tried to press one into her friend’s palm, but the friend yanked her hand away and made a face.

  Oh stop it, Lena. You know you’re ravenous, Olga said. Just put it in your mouth. Oscar here’s a professional, aren’t you? Olga winked at him and Oscar nodded though he wasn’t entirely sure what she was winking about.

  What he did know with certainty was that all the filaments in his brain skittered into the word YES when Olga’s friend reluctantly bit into his croissant. When she licked a flake off her lip, he thought Byzantium. He was entering the poem, had reencountered its lines here for a reason. He’d finally reached the elusive season it described, the one after disillusionment, after prolonging his youth until he had become its aging narrator, drifting like an ancient, paltry thing, no more than a coat on a stick—

  And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

  To the holy city of Byzantium.

  Transaction Log for Olga’s

  SEEK THE SUBLIME OR DIE

  Still Thursday, S, but had to fill you in on this curious abundance of an afternoon!

  12:35, Received

  No books but some pretty excellent croissants from my new baker friend with the shaggy hair. For a northerner, he seems like a humble, decent chap. I may have to coax Lena to take him home, but I could tell she wanted to. What famous poet is it who said distraction can crack open unexpected doors?

  5:09, Just Bought

  An entire wheelbarrow full of books. Twenty-six of them, buried since your last year on this earth, S. A twelve-year-old from up the street who’d never come into the store before wheeled them down. He’d hit upon the books while digging a hole to bury his pet bird. Here’s what I got for the cost of a pizza—he was hoping for more, but aren’t we all:

  -2 volumes of Marx

  -1 leather-bound Remembrance of Things Past, although Proust never sells, a fact that led to a pleasant discussion with the kid about why so many people buried their Prousts, whether it came from a fear of appearing to sympathize with the French Revolution, or if it had more to do with the fact that Proust is long-winded and hard to follow, which we tend to associate with intellectuals and communists. The kid laughed at this and told me he read a long book once at school and liked it. I told him that probably means he’s a communist at heart. He laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. To be a communist, S, is nothing but a punch line in this country now.

  -And the one great find in the kid’s wheelbarrow, great enough to cause a flutter in my ever more corrupt and capitalistic heart: an illustrated Kama Sutra. I placed it immediately in the front window.

  Sad prediction for the future

  The Sutra will go to a professor who has sex with no one.

  * * *

  Lena had been determined to find Oscar’s croissant a tasteless failure—bland as the blockbusters of his country.

  But the hint of salt, the way the layers flaked and dissolved on her tongue—everything about Oscar’s damn croissant was undeniably satisfying.

  Hours later, she could still taste it in her mouth when she woke in her bedroom. She’d intended to take a short nap to sleep off the whiskey before resuming her Google search on Maria P. But it was dark by the time she woke, her room drafty from the damp air that pressed in every evening from the ocean.

  Still dizzy from the whiskey, she slid off her bed. The floor felt liquid-cold. With a shiver, she stopped at her dresser for a pair of socks from the wide top drawer where she also kept her underwear and bras. She sorted them into three orderly sections as her family’s help had done, which made the unexpected object now in the left front corner immediately apparent. Folded neatly upon itself was a lacy, padded white satin bra—the fussily ornate kind a mother bought for her teenaged daughter, or that a naïve, eager-to-please girl in college might continue wearing to please a boyfriend, its lace-covered satin so stiff and immaculate it shimmered.
/>
  She flicked on the light to make sure she wasn’t mistaken, was indeed awake and not trapped in some kind of whiskey-induced dream state. But with the light on, the fact of the bra there in her drawer became indisputable. Tucked into the corner next to the beige cotton bras she wore until the clasps broke was a bright white intruder that unspooled something inside her.

  She’d been wearing such a bra the first time Victor had seen her undressed in full daylight. They’d gone in her mother’s car to a little beach cove up the coast. As they’d climbed over the rocks to the hidden sandbar below, Victor told her that the previous evening his father had run into someone at a bar who’d been with Victor’s uncle the night he’d been detained. For over a decade, Victor’s father had been trying to find out what had happened to his brother Edgar, who’d been among the schoolteachers rounded up for protesting against the bogus election results declaring Cato the new president. Victor’s father had never stopped asking and searching on the chance that Edgar might still be imprisoned somewhere on the island. But the man at the bar said he’d seen Edgar shot and loaded onto a truck.

  As Lena had listened, she’d thought of her family, her mother floating that same morning in their enormous pool, of her grandfather lowering his newspaper just last Sunday and declaring that the damn communists had gotten what they deserved. She’d felt nauseous with guilt as she’d stood beside Victor, watching the thin strands of kelp slapping back and forth against the rocks. She hadn’t known what else to say beyond sorry, then apologize for repeating such an inadequate response.

  When Victor hooked his fingers under the hem of her shirt, she’d helped him lift it over her head, eager to make of her body a deeper, further apology. The stiff white satin of her bra had taken on an eerie sheen in the sunlight as he pulled her straps down and slid it to her waist. She’d felt irremediably naked watching him take in her breasts and the rest of her on the uneven slope of sand beneath them, as if no clothes would ever entirely conceal her from anyone again.

  In her bedroom, staring down at the white satin bra folded upon itself in the corner of her drawer, she felt the shock all over again of Victor’s bitten nail, the raw scrape of it that morning when he shoved his finger upward, inside her.

  Just shut the drawer, she told herself. But she’d come to trust her impulse for self-recrimination more than any other.

  And so her hand made its way to the bra.

  And alone in her cold bedroom, she hooked it on.

  * * *

  Sealed behind the heavy door of his office, Victor lifted the day’s newspaper until it formed a barricade around his face. He never read the Arts section unless there was something in it about his brother and even then he rarely finished a column. They’d run a whole interview with Freddy this time about his new play opening tonight. Victor pulled the paper a little closer with the intention of forcing himself to read at least some of it. But the photograph was too distracting. He didn’t understand why Freddy had to dress to such an extreme for a publicity shot, wrapping his neck in a sparkling velvet scarf as if he were some corpulent opera star.

  I’m assuming all the characters will be gay in this one, too, he’d said when Freddy told him about the interview, to which Freddy responded with one of his booming laughs. In grade school, Victor had felt conspicuous about his inability to laugh as fully, or freely, as his brother could. But once he realized the respect his seriousness generated in others, he was glad for Freddy to be the funny one, for his brother’s inimitable laugh to occasionally ease something in him as well.

  As often as he could, he tried to make it to Freddy’s openings, although he’d missed the last one to be with Maria. Her family had gone away for the night, and she’d asked him to come to her this time. Until he’d entered her bedroom, with its girlish purple-trimmed curtains, he’d resisted thinking about how much younger she was, how disgusted her parents would be if they knew. The narrowness of Maria’s single mattress, the sight of her nightgown folded under her pillow, all of it had hurled him back to Lena.

  The second he saw Maria folding flyers, arguing with some other girls, the similarity had pierced him. Maria was much taller, her face longer. But she had a similar way of squinting when she made a point, that same intensity that made other girls shrink a little, away from her.

  But there had been more than that as well, something about Maria’s oversized sweaters, her habit of tugging at the sleeves, as if she didn’t trust herself to ever get them positioned exactly right. Her unease with her body had made his mouth dry, breaking down whatever it was in a man’s mind that kept his longings separate from his regrets.

  There’s just something about this Maria, he’d told Freddy when he apologized for missing the last opening, I couldn’t say no.

  At that point, Maria had been working mainly on emails and posters, the details girls always liked to do. He’d mentioned her name to his brother without even thinking about it.

  He hadn’t expected her to get so adamant, so overcome with manic ambition. When Maria showed him the elaborate strategy she’d written up for how the country might fully finance tuition for the poorest students on the island, he’d flattered her. Any number of similar plans had been circulating in the Senate for years. But he hadn’t seen any harm in encouraging her, in exaggerating how innovative he found her thinking as he slipped her shirt down off her shoulder. He’d told her she was really on to something, and Maria had kept chattering, breathless and excited by his approval—all of it so familiar that he hadn’t realized he’d begun to murmur Lena’s name until Maria pushed him off her.

  Victor tensed, felt a cramp in his thigh. He had to stop rethinking how it all had unfolded. The night doorman at his building hardly looked up from the soccer on his TV when someone entered, and how many times, total, had Maria come to his apartment? Ten? Twelve? Maybe even less than that.

  Victor hit the button on his phone for his secretary and asked her to order a crate of wine for the Zodiac, for it to be delivered to the theater by six. Expense it as civic engagement, please, he added.

  Most of the artsy types who filled the Zodiac didn’t bother to vote but they were talkers. He could bring Cristina and use it to make their engagement public. The cramped, noisy lobby of the theater would make it impossible for Freddy to get started with any of his questions again. It was a brilliant plan, really. Superb. How many times had he been chased down in the protests and never caught? He was a street dog, always had been. And everyone loved the emergence of a new power couple to follow in the papers.

  Victor widened his legs to roll his chair closer to the edge of his desk and phoned his brother. What would you say to your favorite senator sponsoring the wine tonight?

  Funny you called, Freddy said. I was just working on something and thinking of you.

  SCENES FROM THE PRUNING OF A FUTURE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

  (WORK-IN-PROGRESS BY FMG)

  At the outset of the regime

  SET

  A shabby kitchen, paint chipping on the cabinets.

  A platter with a roasted chicken reigns, untouched, on a simple table.

  The lights come up as the father closes an imaginary door and says good-bye to someone who has already stepped out.

  After locking the imaginary door, the father sits and covers his face.

  Also at the table:

  A plastic doll in a high chair,

  A wife in a housedress,

  and a man wearing a sign around his neck that says FUTURE CANDIDATE, AGE 5.

  MOTHER

  They’ll release him.

  They can’t keep all those people locked up indefinitely, and your brother knows everyone.

  He’ll find someone who can—

  FATHER

  Just stop it, would you please?

  What do you know?

  You don’t know anything.

  Pause.

&nb
sp; The mother starts to weep, which sets off the baby in the high chair.

  As the baby is a doll, its wails emerge from the speakers.

  The Future Candidate’s lips begin to tremble.

  He hunches over to hide it.

  At his first all-out sob,

  the father grabs his shoulder, forces him to sit up.

  FATHER

  Don’t you start, son.

  Keep it in.

  Find a spot on the wall like a senator.

  Fix your gaze on it.

  You want to be a man, right?

  The father stares out at the audience, wipes his eyes.

  * * *

  Olga had just begun to sip her morning thermos of tea on Friday when Lena ducked in, jerking the loose door handle harder than necessary. Without a hello or any sort of greeting, Lena parked in front of the register and yanked up her sweatshirt and the tank top underneath it, revealing a white lace bra that looked at least a size too small, trapping in a pair of taut, round breasts even lovelier than Olga had expected.

  See this? Lena asked. It appeared in my drawer last night.

  Well, my friend, God was good to you. He never left me a bosom that impressive in my drawer. Olga took a rigorous slurp from her thermos.

  I meant the bra. Lena blushed and tugged her sweatshirt down. It’s hers, Olga. It’s Maria P.’s. She’s not going to leave me alone until I do something. I haven’t owned a bra this lacy and absurd in years. And do you know what the brand name is on the tag? It’s Freddy, the brand Freddy! Which also happens to be the name of Victor’s brother, right? And Freddy’s new show is opening tonight at the Zodiac. It could be another coincidence, I know—Lena held up her hand—but what if it’s not? What if Maria wants me to go tonight and ask Freddy whether Victor ever mentioned her? Freddy and I always got along, and maybe Victor himself will show up and I can confront him directly. It’s been ten years. It’s time, don’t you think?