“Yes, but Mum, can’t you become increasingly concerned about something else?”
“Doesn’t it matter to you who your partners are in this project? I know you, darling, and I know you’re not a mercenary, I know you have ideals—I raised you, for God’s sake, so I know. I’ve been into it very deeply, Miriam, too, and we’ve come to the conclusion that at this point the human-rights issue is really becoming untenable—I wish it wasn’t, for your sake, but there it is. Darling, don’t you want to know—”
“Mum, sorry—I’ll call you back—I have to go.”
Fern, in an ill-fitting, clearly rented suit, a little too short at the ankles, was walking toward me, waving goofily, and I don’t think I realized how far out of the loop I had fallen until that moment. To me he was a cut-out figure pasted in the wrong photograph, in the wrong moment. He smiled, pulled open the sliding doors, his head cocked to the side like a terrier: “Ah, but you look really beautiful.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me you were coming? Why didn’t you?”
He drew a hand through curls half tamed by cheap hair gel, and looked sheepish, a schoolboy caught out in a minor misdemeanor.
“Well, I was on confidential business. It’s ridiculous, but all the same I couldn’t tell you, I’m sorry. They wanted it kept quiet.”
I looked over to where he was pointing and saw Lamin. He sat at the central table in a white suit, like the groom at a wedding, with Judy and Aimee either side of him.
“Jesus Christ.”
“No, no, I don’t think it was him. Not unless he works for the State Department.” He took a step forward and put his hands on the barrier wall. “But what a view this is!”
The whole city lay before us. I set my back to it, turning to study Fern instead, to check on his reality, and then to watch Lamin accept a slice of cake from a passing waiter. I tried to account for the panic I felt. It was more than simply being kept in the dark, it was a rejection of the way I ordered my own reality. For in my mind, at that time—as perhaps it is for most young people—I was at the center of things, the only person in the world with true freedom. I moved from here to there, observing life as it presented itself to me, but everybody else in these scenes, all the subsidiary characters, belonged only in the compartments in which I had placed them: Fern eternally in the pink house, Lamin confined to the dusty paths of the village. What were they doing here, now, in my New York? I didn’t know how to talk to either of them in the Rainbow Room, wasn’t sure what our relation should be, or what, in this context, I owed or was due. I tried to imagine how Lamin was feeling right now, on the other side of the matrix at last, and if he had someone to guide him through this bewildering new world, someone to help explain to him the obscene amounts of money that had here been expended on things like helium balloons and steamed squid buns and four hundred peonies. But it was Aimee at his side, not me, and she had no such concerns, I could see that from here, this was her world and he had simply been invited into it as she would have invited anyone else, as a privilege and a gift, the same way queens once unself-consciously offered their patronage. In her mind it was all fate, always meant to be, and therefore fundamentally uncomplicated. That’s what I and Judy and Fern and all of us were being paid for really: to keep life uncomplicated—for her. We waded through the tangled weeds so she might float over the surface.
“Anyway, I was glad to come. I wanted to see you.” Fern reached over and brushed my right shoulder with his hand, and in the moment I thought he was only removing some dust, my mind was elsewhere, I was stuck on this image of me caught in the weeds and Aimee floating serenely over my head. Then his other hand went to my other shoulder: still I did not understand. Like everybody else at that party, except perhaps Fern himself, I could not take my eyes off Lamin and Aimee.
“My God, look at this!”
Fern glanced over briefly to where I was pointing and caught Lamin and Aimee as they exchanged a brief kiss. He nodded: “Ah, so they do not hide any more!”
“Jesus Christ. Is she going to marry him? Is she going to adopt him?”
“Who cares? I don’t want to talk about her.”
Suddenly Fern grabbed both my hands in his hands, and when I turned back I found that he was staring at me with comic intensity.
“Fern, what are you doing?”
“You pretend to be cynical”—he kept seeking my eyes as I tried equally hard to avoid his—“but I think you are just afraid.”
In his accent it sounded like a line from one of the Mexican telenovelas we used to watch with half the village, each Friday afternoon, in the school’s TV room. I couldn’t help it—I laughed. His eyebrows came together in a sad line.
“Please don’t laugh at me.” He looked down at himself, and I looked, too: I think it was the first time I’d ever seen him out of cargo shorts. “The truth is I don’t know how to dress in New York.”
I eased my hands from his.
“Fern, I don’t know what you think this is. You really don’t know me.”
“Well, you are hard to know well. But I want to know you. That is what it’s like, being in love. You want to know someone, better.”
It seemed to me that the situation was so awkward that he should just disappear at this point—just as such scenes in the telenovelas cut to a commercial—because otherwise I didn’t see how we were going to get through the next two minutes. He didn’t move. Instead he grabbed two passing flutes of champagne from a waiter’s tray and drank his down in one go.
“You have nothing to say to me? I am offering you my heart!”
“Oh my God—Fern—please! Stop talking like that! I don’t want your heart! I don’t want to be responsible for anybody else’s heart. For anybody else’s anything!”
He looked confused: “A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.”
“For myself.” Now I drank down a whole flute. “I just want to be responsible for myself.”
“Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people. Look at Aimee.”
“Look at Aimee?”
“Why not? You have to admire her. She’s not ashamed. She loves this young man. It will probably mean a lot of trouble for her.”
“You mean: for us. It’ll mean a lot of trouble for us.”
“But she doesn’t care what people think.”
“That’s because as usual she has no idea what she’s getting into. The whole thing is absurd.”
They were leaning on each other, watching the magician, an engaging gentleman in a Savile Row suit and a bow-tie who’d been at Jay’s eighth birthday, too. He was doing the trick of the Chinese rings. Light poured into the Rainbow Room and the rings slipped in and out of each other despite their apparent solidity. Lamin looked mesmerized—everybody did. I could hear, very faintly, Chinese prayer music, and understood, in the abstract, that this must be part of the effect. I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it.
“You are jealous?”
“I wish I could fool myself the way she can. I’m jealous of anyone that oblivious. A little ignorance never stopped her. Nothing stops her.”
Fern emptied his glass and placed it awkwardly on the ground.