Читать книгу America for Beginners - Leah Franqui - Страница 14

Rebecca Elliot woke up to the sound of snoring. This wasn’t the first time Max’s nasal trumpeting had disturbed her but it would be the last, she told herself as she stared up at the ceiling. A headache from last night’s whiskey pounded at her temples. She had met this one, like many before him, at a bar, after another failed audition a few weeks ago where the casting director had eyed her breasts but not her performance and sent her on her way with a limp “Great work.”

Rebecca habitually used her combined salary from part-time jobs in a coffee shop and a small map store to buy cheap drinks at the place around the corner from her apartment, a Chinese restaurant that became a dive bar after five. It attracted odd people, which is why Rebecca liked it. This boy, Max, had joined her that night, and together they’d washed away her desperation with alcohol, only here it was again, as always, waiting for her as the man beside her slept.

Yesterday’s audition, the third she had drunk her way toward forgetting since she met Max, had been particularly painful. It was for the role of Anya in The Cherry Orchard. Rebecca loved that role; she had wanted to play it since college. It was a prestigious director and it was a huge production and it was Anya. But when she had entered the room, the casting director had looked her up and down and frowned, explaining that they would be doing the readings for Varya, Anya’s older sister by seven years, the following day. Rebecca had blinked back her tears and explained that she was there for Anya and everyone had laughed and joked and pretended it was fine. Rebecca had auditioned and tried to “use it” but the damage was done. She left shaking, wishing she could throw up, wishing she had the kind of mom she could call for sympathy.

Rebecca had grown up in Washington, DC, the only daughter of well-educated, well-bred American Jews. Her father, Morris Elliot, ran a small law firm specializing in divorce, which was a prosperous business given his discretion and the instability of many political marriages. Rebecca’s mother, Cynthia Greenbaum, taught economics at Georgetown University, where she delighted in sparring with her Catholic coworkers. They had raised Rebecca with strong assurances that she could be anything she wanted to be, and then, like so many American parents, were surprised and dismayed when she believed them.

She had attended Columbia University because her parents, alumni of the school, approved, and since they were the people footing the bill, that was important. To her, it didn’t matter where she went, just as long as it was in New York. She had dreamed of the city since she had been a child. She’d done well, but she hadn’t made friends, holding herself apart from everyone but the theater crowd and acting in every role for which someone cast her. It seemed for a time that it would even be easy. She couldn’t imagine failure. Who can, before it’s actually happening?

Rebecca graduated with a flurry of acting accolades and enough flashbulb photos snapped by her proud parents to cause a seizure in a susceptible person. But once the world of acting was no longer confined to her pool of fellow students, Rebecca realized for the first time that acting was a form of begging, and all you could have was what people decided to give you.

She had gotten a few roles, a few commercials, a lot of promises of things that were going to be “the thing that launched her,” and nothing had. So, after the early difficult years following college, Rebecca found herself performing in her own life. When she met someone new they would transform in her mind to an audience, and Rebecca would go to work. Her body would grow languid and pliable, her breath lifting her chest in trembling motions that held men, and sometimes women, captive. She was sick of this performance, but it kept attracting audiences, and given that almost a year had passed since her last real acting job, she wasn’t sure if she could actually play another role anymore.

Next to her, Max shifted again, throwing his hand over her breast. It was clammy with sweat. Glancing at her buzzing phone, Rebecca realized that she was late for work at the coffee shop, again, which meant she would be fired, again. She supposed she should be unhappy, but she only felt annoyed. Every job but the map store was disposable and yet she was always surprised when she discovered her employers felt the same way about her.

“Turn that off, would you?” the guy, Max, asked groggily. It was one in the afternoon. Rebecca’s phone buzzed again, a voice mail this time. She deleted it, already knowing what it said.

“Thanks.” Max coughed, and reached down to his pants, which were lying in a heap on the floor of Rebecca’s otherwise neat apartment. He took out a pack of cigarettes and fumbled around his pocket for a lighter.

“What are you doing?” Rebecca didn’t mind smokers. She even had the occasional cigarette herself, when drunk or stressed or devastated or all three at once, which happened more and more these days. But no one smoked in her apartment. Not that he was asking, this near stranger, this idiot poser who claimed to want to make music but really just spent his time getting high in the Williamsburg apartment his parents had purchased for him after he graduated from the Berklee College of Music without a record deal or a clue.

The strength of Rebecca’s sudden hatred surprised her. She had enjoyed Max, his banter, his faux self-deprecation and real self-satisfaction. She even liked him in bed, finding his confidence and his rich vocabulary welcome. Now, sitting naked, blowing smoke in her face, with last evening’s drinks seeping out of his pores and sweating onto her sheets, he disgusted her.

“I have to go. I have work.” Rebecca stood and walked into the bathroom. In her studio apartment, the walk wasn’t long. Avoiding her own gaze in the mirror, she ran the shower, soaping up briskly, tempted to linger in the hopes that Max would leave and never return and that would be the end of it.

“I’m making us breakfast!” His cheerful call echoed through the apartment. Damn it, Rebecca thought. He was trying to be nice. He was trying to be the “good guy.” There had been ones like him in the past, ones who had thought they liked her for her no-strings declarations, somehow thinking they were a lure and a challenge, not statements of fact. They rushed in to claim her in some way, but this quickly moved from amusing to disturbing. They took such pride in being good, these men, in being what they assumed she must want based solely on her insistence that she didn’t.

Rebecca rushed out of the bathroom in a manufactured hurry.

“I’m late! Sorry, sorry, so sweet of you, sorry, but I have to run. Sorry!”

She pulled on clothing quickly, tying up her wet hair and hopping into jeans as Max, standing with a bowl of half-beaten eggs in his hands, looked on, concerned.

“You should eat something, Beck. It’s important.”

He had a nickname for her? Rebecca’s mouth twisted with disgust.

“No time! Sorry! Had such a good time I didn’t even remember my stupid job. Really gotta go! That smells great. Please, eat it, obviously, and let yourself out when you go. The door locks behind you, okay?”

And she was gone, closing the door on his protest. Her phone beeped.

Last night was great. Miss you already, sexy. Get some breakfast on your way.

It was perfectly constructed, a neatly packaged mix of flirt and feeling. Rebecca closed her eyes, her head pounding even harder.

Thanks, she responded. Please don’t smoke in my apartment. She turned off her phone, and, with nothing else to do, she headed north, to the map store.

Maps on St. Mark’s was a small dusty place owned and operated by its founder, Rasheed Ghazi, who first opened the store in 1980. Mr. Ghazi, as everyone, including Rebecca, now called him, had been a philosophy professor in his native Tehran before his disagreements over matters such as freedom of speech and other trifles ran him afoul of the ayatollah and he was forced to depart. In Tehran, Professor Ghazi had specialized in giving people complicated answers designed specifically to provoke more complicated questions, but now he ran a dusty tiny store selling maps in the East Village, and specialized in giving people large pieces of paper designed to tell them simply where to go. The irony was not lost on him, or Rebecca, who had learned his life story over their many long afternoons together, watching the tourists outside of the store’s one window drift by.

Mr. Ghazi referred to Iran by its older title, Persia, as the only act of rebellion left to an expat unable to return to his homeland. Not that he would have wanted to. The country he had known and loved was gone, its current incarnation bearing little resemblance to what he thought of as home. With his family either displaced throughout America or slaughtered, and unwilling to put old friends in danger by contacting them, Mr. Ghazi contented himself with the small older Persian population he could scrape together in New York. However, he did not limit himself to their numbers alone. He found he had a kind of affinity with many immigrants, especially Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian ones. They shared spices and rices, and the whispers of a destroyed but still missed home buzzed in all their ears. Mr. Ghazi felt comfortable with these men, these Pakistani cab drivers and Lebanese convenience store owners, much to the consternation of his wife, Sheedah, who felt that he was lowering himself in spending time with uneducated foreigners. Rebecca heard them arguing about it some days, for the Ghazis lived over the store. Personally she enjoyed the strange men who came to greet Mr. Ghazi and bring him rose-scented pastries and bags dripping with grease. She always got the leftovers.

Mr. Ghazi had bought his tiny apartment and the store below it twenty years ago when the East Village was still a wild no-man’s-land. Back then it had been all he and his wife could afford. Now he and Sheedah were immune to astronomical rent raises and were, in fact, sitting on a gold mine. Sheedah, whose only interest in American events was reading the local real estate news, begged him to sell so they could buy a condo and retire in suburban New Jersey, but he refused. For this, Rebecca would be eternally grateful, as the work was easy, the pay was enough, and the stability of the store was the only thing keeping her vaguely sane.

Mr. Ghazi was a creature of habit. He opened the shop each day at ten A.M. exactly. He ate lunch, a curry from a local place that delivered, along with a fruit salad (for health) and strong black coffee, every day, closing the shop from twelve thirty P.M. to one thirty P.M. to enjoy his lunch in peace. Anyone who knew him knew this. Rebecca assumed he would be surprised to see his only employee knocking tentatively on the door at one twenty-five that Friday afternoon.

She didn’t need to knock, being in possession of a key, but she did so anyway out of respect. Rebecca made her own hours but always told him what those hours would be, and she felt a twinge of guilt at not calling to tell him she was coming. After all, he barely needed her at all, even when she was scheduled to work.

Mr. Ghazi had hired Rebecca seven years ago after he had broken his ankle due to a fall reaching for an atlas from 1498 describing the geography of medieval Europe. He needed help while he healed. At twenty-one Rebecca was kind, responsible, and cheerful, and in need of part-time work. She competently ran the shop as he recuperated. Once he had fully healed, however, he couldn’t bear to fire this bright young actress, and he kept her on to assist him, to keep him company, to charm customers and browsing friends, and to give Sheedah someone to foist lamb dishes and pastries on. Sheedah, who usually hated American women with their bare arms and their loud voices, took an instant liking to Rebecca for no particular reason other than her once-mentioned interest in Persian rugs. It was done. Rebecca became a permanent fixture in the shop.

Rebecca smiled tentatively as she entered the shop, savoring the scents of old paper and dust and curry from Mr. Ghazi’s lunch. The needs reflected in the eyes of her recent bed partner were mercifully banished by Mr. Ghazi’s familiar smiling gaze, though it did hold a hint of worry.

“Do I look that bad?” Rebecca patted her still-damp hair self-consciously.

“I have never understood how you leave your home with hair still dripping. My mother would have had fits.”

Rebecca smiled as Mr. Ghazi scolded her. “So would mine.” She stepped around Mr. Ghazi and headed to the minuscule back room to put her bag down and try to do something presentable with her wet, bedraggled hair. Catching sight of herself in the mirror, her eyes smudged with last night’s eye makeup, she sighed.

“I do look that bad,” she called out to him.

“These are your words, not mine.” Rebecca smiled. Her boss was a sweet man. “It was a bad night?” Rebecca was wiping off her eye makeup and almost missed the question. She paused for a moment, as she often did before responding to Mr. Ghazi’s probes into her personal life. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but Rebecca was careful with her candor, because Mr. Ghazi, while liberal in many respects, was still a Muslim immigrant from Iran, and Rebecca was never sure what would shock. It was safer to test the waters with little moments than to reveal her entire life to him. Rebecca didn’t want to lose her tentative Persian family, so she made her life fit into what she perceived to be their scope of understanding and morality.

But something about the morning, with its crushing panic, and her immediate reaction of escaping and fleeing to the map store, made her feel that if she did not tell Mr. Ghazi in some small way that she was suffocating she would start to cry, and she didn’t want to do that in front of him.

“It was a bad night.” She finished washing her face and stepped back into the main room of the store, where Mr. Ghazi’s inquiring eyes made tears spring from her own. Damn, she thought, there I go.

“What is it, Rebecca? What makes you so sad?” Mr. Ghazi gestured for Rebecca to sit, keeping a formal distance. He had always been awkward around emotional females, his wife included, but he considered it an honor that Rebecca had admitted her pain, which she so often kept tucked away like a handkerchief. Watching her in the seven years she had been in his employ, he had seen her early enthusiasm become a hardened fear, and he worried for her.

Rebecca struggled to contain herself, but it felt so futile. What was the point of holding herself back? What was she containing her feelings for, anyway? A politeness? A vague social expectation that she wasn’t supposed to feel anything at all? The way everyone kept saying that they were fine until the point where the word lost all meaning? She wasn’t fine. She hadn’t been for years.

“There was this boy—” she started.

“Did someone hurt you?” Mr. Ghazi looked both disturbed and in some way relieved. If it was a love affair gone wrong, this was at least familiar territory. There were platitudes he could express, soothing words he could say. He waited.

“He’s not important. I just feel like I am slipping. It’s harder than I thought anything could be and I’m so tired. I need someone to give me the chance. I hate that. Why can’t I choose, instead of wanting to be chosen?”

She felt pathetic. He looked at her with pity and she wanted to hide.

“I’m sorry. I’m being stupid.” Rebecca’s voice pierced the air as she apologized for herself, brushing aside her feelings in a bid to return to normalcy. She should have claimed it was women’s troubles and let it be.

“You are not stupid, Rebecca. But if this is your life, you must change it. If this is the world you live in, one that confronts you with a feeling that you are not worth being chosen, then it is a stupid world.”

He didn’t understand. He was kind, but he didn’t understand anything.

“Unless I can change the things I want, how can I change the way my life is?”

Mr. Ghazi had no answers. Maybe that was the cure for pain. It was to stop wanting anything at all.