Parts Unknown

Chapter 4





It was late morning when we woke up. Made love again, discarded condoms littering the floor like crumpled little snakeskins—too difficult to bother to get up, and walk them to the wastebasket, when there was so much to learn.

Utter starvation pushed us out of the room at last, down the creaky stairs and into the shared kitchen. A discontented-looking man with a moon-shaped face sat at the kitchen table, lugubriously slurping a bowl of soup.

“Boris, my man!” exclaimed Josh heartily. “How’s it hangin’?”

Boris grunted and didn’t look up. Josh poked around in the refrigerator. “Pizza for breakfast?” he called.

“Sure,” I agreed, uncomfortable around this incommunicative man. Our presence in the kitchen seemed to be ruining his day; he glared at me from under lowered eyelids. He was so pale—perhaps he never went outside.

The microwave dinged. “Brekkie!” shouted Josh, as if his bright mood could dispel the misery that lurked behind Boris’s empty eyes. “We’ll eat au dehors, mademoiselle,” he instructed, nearly shoving me out the back door. A light drizzle was falling, but I was relieved to be out of that kitchen. The scarred wooden table outside had a lingering smell of damp, stale beer and old cigarettes. I munched my pizza—an all-meat special, apparently. My empty stomach somersaulted. I hugged Josh’s sweatshirt tight around me. “What’s his story?” I whispered, jerking my head toward the kitchen door.

“I should’ve warned you. He’s one of two perpetually unemployed guys that lives here. I think he’s from Russia or somewhere. I have no idea how he got into this country or how he supports himself. As far as I can tell he only leaves the flat to buy groceries. Always things in cans and sometimes this really smelly smoked mackerel.”

I shuddered. “He seems so sad.”

“Yeah, sad, because he’ll probably get kicked out of the country eventually. He’s hiding out, I bet. Our own Russian spy!”

In the kitchen, I heard a huge clatter—Boris washing up and stomping off, a self-contained tempest of inward-centered rage and misery.

“Fun place,” I whispered.

“Yeah. You’ll like my other two flatmates though. There’s Trevor, he’s from Nigeria. He’s been looking for a job for ages, real nice guy. He’s pretty much the opposite of Boris, personality-wise. And then there’s Dov. He’s Israeli. Kind of a lightweight. Works at a travel agency.”

Josh reached into his shirt pocket and casually removed a pack of cigarettes. I raised my eyebrows. “You smoke?”

“Bad habit,” he affirmed, tapping the pack against the table and pulling out a cigarette. “You want one?”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

Josh reached into his pants pocket and extracted a lighter. After five attempts, a small flame blazed. “Want to try?”

Squeaky-clean former me would have said a definitive no. But my world was upside down these days. “Sure, why not?” I agreed, thankful that Josh hadn’t produced crack cocaine, which I would probably have felt obliged to try as well.

He chose a cigarette, lit it against his, and passed it over. “Pull the smoke into your lungs,” he advised. “Don’t just puff on it and breathe out, you know?”

I experimentally inhaled, taking deep breaths as he had instructed. The smoke tasted awful—like breathing in odors from a trash can. After about five puffs, I practically fainted, nearly falling off the chair. I had to rest my head on my arms for a while, feeling ill. Josh ruffled my hair with concern. “I guess you breathed in too deep. You’re just a beginner. Don’t worry, you’ll be an addict in no time!”

“Thanks a lot,” I muttered. But I thought I’d try smoking, again. I seemed to have forgotten to press some invisible “stop” button that had always prevented me from doing stupid or dangerous things. Now I wanted to say yes to everything, to try everything.

“So, what’re we going to do today?” I asked, shyly. It felt weird, being part of a “we,” now.

Josh started whistling. It was the theme from Tweety Bird—“I’m a thweet little bird,” I sang along, as we tossed pizza bits in the trash, “in a gilded cage . . .” up the stairs, “Tweety’s my name,” back into bed—“and I don’t know my age . . .”

A while later, we picked it up again, as Josh introduced me to Camden Town. In daylight, it was a whole crazy world; streets packed with tourists and grungy-looking students. We explored a dizzying array of cheap stalls inside the garishly green-colored entrance to Camden Market. Galoshes, incense, naughty postcards, woven backpacks from India. “I’ve got a trapeze, and a nice little dish,” we sang, watching a blonde dreadlocked girl create enormous bubbles from an almost human-sized bubble wand. Arms draped around each other, we hollered, “. . . there’s nothing I need, I live like a king . . . It’s lucky for me I learned how to sing!”

No one paid the least bit of attention. It was like the whole city was built just for us to wander around in—in our own small bubble of happiness.

Josh didn’t have to work until that evening again, so we wandered through the city, through patches of rain; caught the first bus we saw, and just sat on it for a while, watching the streets rush by, till it spit us out unexpectedly in the City of London. Dark, twisting medieval avenues with gloomy names like Moorgate, lined with boxy gray banks and investment firms. They looked like glass prisons, encased in steel. I shivered. “I never want to grow up—imagine having to work in one of those places every day.”

“And with your sooooo-useful history degree, you won’t have to!” Josh concluded. I kicked him.

“Listen . . .you’re probably wondering why I’ve got all this time on my hands,” Josh interjected. “You’re probably like, where are this guy’s friends?”

Honestly, I hadn’t thought about that. “What, you don’t exist just for me?” I kidded.

“I had this group of pals at LSE—but they were all American or Canadian JYA guys, like me. I never could figure out the British mind-set, much as I love it here. It’s like, no one would let me in.”

We stopped at a sandwich shop and sat on drab stone benches in a concrete outdoor plaza. Even our brie-and-mushroom sandwiches were gray . . . except for the corn. I had noticed, over the past few meals, that the British persisted in putting sweet corn in everything. “So then the school year ended, and everyone went home, except for me. So I’ve been bumming around on my own this summer, mostly. Going for drinks sometimes with some girls I work with at Chicago Pizza, and hangin’ with my roommates, but, you know . . .” he shrugged. “It was lonely. Until you came along.” He kissed me, slowly. “Like I was just waiting for you.”

~ ~ ~

August 5, I fetched my duffel from the hostel, lugging it on the Tube with Josh, he holding one handle, I the other. I never bothered to ask for my money back from the new girl at the desk. I’d worked so hard for that money, but now it hardly mattered. And moving in with Josh, three days after I’d met him, seemed completely natural. The hostel seemed so small and insignificant now—what had I been so worried about, days ago? Everyone rushing around like ants, trying to see everything, “do” London so they could round out their itineraries. Their priorities seemed so pitiful. Poor things. No one could ever be as deeply in love as I was.

I called home the next morning from the squat black pay phone installed in Josh’s front hall. I had a pocketful of pound coins, and each one would last exactly a minute, which ticked down frighteningly fast on the LCD display on the front of the phone.

I’d long ago given up wondering why my parents never called me at college, but I suspected it was a combination of forgetfulness and reluctance to pay for long-distance charges. Nevertheless, I tried to call home every week, even while in London. Doing so felt faintly rebellious.

I could hear the phone lines crackling nervously as they reached their poorly wired destination—that house out of another time, whose residents warily tiptoed around its perimeters. I couldn’t talk quickly enough, it seemed, before the numbers would be down almost to zero and I’d be depositing another coin. I spoke loudly, as if the louder I talked, the less truth I’d have to tell.

Marty picked up on the first ring. I could tell it was him because of the rude noise he made into the phone.

“Hi, Marty! What’s up?”

“Your butt!”

“What are you doing answering the phone?”

“Poo-pee! Poo-pee!”

“Marty! Can you pass the phone to Mom, please?”

I heard a huge crash and a shriek, then Mom’s voice: “Hello, Vivian, sorry about that. How are you? How’s London?”

I heard a lot of crying and yelling in the background—my dad, yelling; Marty crying.

“Mom! I’m having a great time.”

“And are you all settled in at that hostel?”

“Uh huh. It’s okay. Some weird people, but whatever. Listen! London is amazing. Just like I’d hoped.”

“That’s great. Are you calling from one of those red British phone booths?”

“Uh, I’m at a friend’s house. This girl I met, uh, Jill.”

“How nice of her to let you use her phone! I’d like to say hello to her.”

“It’s a pay phone, Mom, just in her house. Some weird British setup. And she’s in the bathroom right now. So I’ll tell her . . . oh, I’m really sorry, I’m running out of pound coins, I can’t talk anymore. Say hi to Dad for me, okay?”

“Wait a minute; I had such a funny thing happen this week with the dishwasher repairman, I just have to tell you. So the dishwasher just stopped working on Tuesday—one day it was working just fine, and then the next, it made this horrible grinding noise . . .”

“Mom, that’s sounds really interesting, but I have to go.”

“Hold on, I’m almost done. So, I’d press the button and nothing would happen except for that noise, it sounded like a cat coughing up a hairball, honestly. So I called Appliance Experts, they’re always so nice--”

“I told you, I’m out of coins here. Tell me next time, okay?” She was still talking as I hung up the phone.

Mom talked a lot, but there was so much she didn’t say. Whitewashing the real issues with pointless stories. At home, I would often find her in the kitchen, reading the ingredients of cleaning supplies, mouthing “oxymethylbutyloxinate” just for something to do. If she was finished with the morning paper and still eating breakfast, she’d read the nutritional information on cereal boxes. She was never not busy.

Talking with my family always made me want to take a nap—I was slammed with mental exhaustion afterward.

There had been a mistake about five years ago, and here was Marty. My mom was almost fifty. She’d thought she was through with raising kids, and was into all these middle-aged-lady activities like going on local garden tours with friends who already did the hair-helmet thing—aging hair bouffanted into an old-lady cloud around their heads.

But it turned out she wasn’t post-menopausal after all, and now there was a maniac kid running around the house, this unwanted child who I barely got to know before escaping to my faraway college. Marty was hyperactive; he was always throwing things, breaking things, and falling down our rickety staircase and smashing his face up. And my mom and dad, never the most affectionate parents a person might hope for, grew ever more distant, acting around the house as if each inhabitant they encountered was an unwelcome surprise visitor.

At home for vacations, I’d sometimes overhear Mom on the phone, updating friends about us. At least five straight minutes of talk about my nineteen-year-old brother Alex. How successful he was, how proud she was, basking in the reflected glory of having a straight-A kid going to an Ivy League school. What she never said was: Alex was gone. He was spending the summer in Boston; he had left for Harvard last fall and hadn’t looked back. He’d finagled a summer job at State Street Bank, handling back-office money market transactions, and was living in an MIT fraternity house that rented its rooms for cheap in the summer. I knew that he wasn’t coming back. Not just for the summer. Never.

I understood why. And I almost didn’t mind that he emailed me less and less often, too. We’d been close all through our childhoods, but I knew why he was avoiding me now, when he’d finally been able to get away.

But I kept showing up, for winter break, for spring break, for summer break. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. And I hated myself for my weakness, for the fact that I kept coming back, kept phoning home, kept hoping for the love and apologies that never came.

On the phone with friends, when Mom was finished with her Alex spiel, and moved on to talking about me, it always went: “Oh yes, Vivian, she’s the artist in the family. A future investment banker and an artist—isn’t it funny how two kids can turn out so differently.” And there I was, dispensed with, in one sentence.

Mom never talked about Marty in those phone conversations. As if, by not mentioning him, he might disappear. Then she and Dad could go back to golfing and gardening, without continual Marty-made disasters forcing them to interact. They could return to colliding only every Friday night for their traditional Friday night dates. That one night, they’d dress up, go out, and display to the friends who always dined that same night, at that same restaurant, every week, how committed to each other they both were, after more than twenty years of marriage.

My dad had recently decided to go into politics. Starting from the ground up, he was a city councilman, and he was often at nighttime council meetings, planning meetings, or out with work friends. This was intentional. And it worked out great for Mom, because she could tell her friends, winding the phone cord obsessively around and around her finger, “Have you heard—this weekend the mayor himself invited Howard to golf with him. Well, Howard and the other council members too. But I mean, what an honor!”

And I could just see Dad driving there smugly in his Cadillac, golf clubs in the trunk. It was an impulse purchase from ten years ago that he’d driven home one day, straight from the dealership. He’d known Mom had her eye on a used Mercedes: as posh as a new Cadillac, but half the price. Whenever she saw his car, her fingers would nervously pluck at the sides of her always-matching outfit, and she’d talk about her shopping list, the store vacancies on Lincoln Avenue, the price of milk, faster and faster, hardly stopping to take a breath. I figured, if she spoke fast enough, she might forget how much she hated that car, the wrong car that my parents couldn’t afford, that they had only recently finished paying off. Dad avoided car confrontation most days by pulling straight into the garage.

They covered it up pretty well, but my parents were barely middle class. They owned a few single-family home rentals, along with Dad’s pay as a city council member and Mom’s seasonal work as a substitute librarian. They made sure to look and act as wealthy as they could, without actually spending much money to do so. Mom and Dad might write our private-college tuition checks, but they used the special checkbooks from our trust accounts to do so. They paid for college with Uncle Paulie’s money.

They’d had a plan once, to make a lot of money without a lot of work, but it hadn’t worked out. It had been a total disaster, in fact, and nothing at home had ever been the same again.

~ ~ ~

I was jolted out of my reverie by the sight of a smiling face peeking out from around one of the doors. “I’ve been waiting to meet you. Josh has said so many wonderful things about you,” said a very dark man with a lovely meld of an African and British accent.

“Hi, you must be Trevor,” I smiled back. “I’m Vivian.” He was impeccably dressed in an ironed white polo shirt and navy-blue shorts with a sharp crease down the front.

“Welcome,” he said. “I must cook you dinner tonight. If Josh has been feeding you . . .” He shook his head darkly.

“What, a person can’t live on pizza and noodles alone?” I laughed. “Thanks for the invite. Josh is working tonight, so I’d love to. What can I bring?”

“Just yourself, of course,” Trevor assured me.

I was unreasonably excited. Josh directed me to the local Sainsbury’s, and I walked up and down its bright aisles for a long time, looking for the perfect accompaniment to an African meal. The food in England was all so lusciously foreign—trifle in single-serve containers, chestnut-flavored yogurt, and muesli in big bags. The frozen foods aisle featured single-serve steak-and-kidney pies. I was so in love with this country now, the leftover pound coins in my pocket my passport to all this.

At last, I decided on a properly British dessert—ginger cake, brown and shiny, in a paper wrapper. Counting out my change confidently to the store clerk, I felt like I finally had the hang of things—until I realized I was meant to have brought my own bag. Was nothing free in this country? Grumpily, I paid for a plastic bag in which to tote my cake, and headed back to the safety of that row house.

Trevor was preparing the meal. I poked my head in. “I’ve got dessert,” I told him, presenting the cake. “My favorite!” he said politely; he would have been equally polite had it been his least favorite kind of cake, I was sure. “Now please, refresh yourself—I will call when dinner is ready,” he instructed. I waved goodbye and headed happily toward the stairs. A strange clanking sound was trailing from Boris’s room. What did he do in there all day? I stopped and listened. Now it sounded like cutting—scissors struggling to slice through a heavy piece of cardboard. I shrugged, and proceeded upstairs. I’d yet to meet the final flatmate, whose room was across the hall from Josh’s. I sort of hoped I wouldn’t—I wasn’t certain how thin the walls were, and I’d been rather noisy, the past few nights.

I opened Josh’s door with the spare key he’d given me and looked in; he was gone for the evening shift. I wandered out to the tiny bathroom at the end of the hall. Squinted at myself in the mirror—hard to make out my face in the hazy glass with the dim light bulb. I made some experimental funny faces, pulling my lips back ridiculously far, then, bored, went back to Josh’s room. Poked around his toiletries for a bit, trying to gauge his personality from the anti-perspirant he used. Speed Stick—hmm. I hadn’t a clue. Thumbed through his books. Inspected his BUNAC Student Exchange Employment Programme work permit, with a deer-caught-in-headlights blurry passport photo that barely looked like Josh at all. A gray rectangular stamp proclaimed HOTEL AND CATERING TRADES EMPLOYMENT SERVICE.

Then, I scouted around for a secret journal; couldn’t find one. I did find some folded-up pieces of lined paper scribbled with poetry I couldn’t understand:



The palimpsest

Writes the writer

A roundelay in close quarters

As the children outside

Play in the sand, erasing

Stick drawings as they make them.



I had a feeling this poem wasn’t very good. I found a few blank notebooks, some with fancy covers that must have been never-used gifts. Apparently, Josh was a blank slate, just as I was. All possibility. No follow through. Yet.

Finally, inevitably, rummaging through my duffel, I pulled out the sketchbook. The girls twirling around the fountain, the light glancing off their hair. Forever incomplete, because Josh had pulled me away from that moment, and into his. I started sketching—still life with anti-perspirant container—then stopped. Lay back on the bed and fell asleep.

A knock on the door woke me for dinner. I hastily smoothed my hair and slipped on some flip-flops, then scuttled down the hallway, bumping into a tall, olive-skinned man with masses of dark curly hair along the way. “Sorry!” I exclaimed.

“So you’re the new live-in, huh,” smirked the man over his shoulder.

“What?” I gasped, confused.

“Just joking!” he returned, grinning at my shocked look. “I’m Dov. I’ve heard about you. Well, we’ll get to know each other over dinner.”

Trevor was smiling, waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs, his hands encased in oven mitts. “I hope you’re hungry,” he said happily. “I have been cooking all afternoon. I wanted you to try some proper Nigerian food.”

“I’m so excited, Trevor,” I said warmly. “I’ve never eaten Nigerian food before.”

“Well, you are in for a treat.” He gestured us toward the kitchen table, transformed into a low-rent dining destination with a wilting dandelion in a jam jar, three mismatched placemats, and bright pink paper napkins. I hugged him impulsively. “No one’s ever cooked me dinner before, either.”

He patted my head. “Sit, please.”

Dov tossed himself into a chair. He appeared not to have shaved in a week, and reeked of cigarettes and another, deeper odor—pot, probably. He was wearing a reddish stretched-out T-shirt that appeared to read “Coca-Cola” in Hebrew. “So how do you like London?” he asked.

“It’s gorgeous!” I enthused. “I haven’t had a chance to see much yet, but it’s so beautiful—the buildings, and everything. And the parks. And . . .”

“Admit it,” Dov chortled, “You’ve been spending most of your time in Josh’s room, haven’t you? I’ve been waiting to catch a glimpse of this mysterious love interest Josh is all gooey-eyed over.”

I blushed. “That’s me, I guess. I’m not so mysterious, though.” Ask questions, I instructed myself, pleating my napkin nervously in my lap. “So how long have you been in London?”

“Since January, actually. I don’t want to go into military service in Israel, and I’m lucky enough to have a British passport, because I happened to be born here. So I’m going to stay away from Israel as long as possible. I don’t want to go back.”

His English was perfect, his Israeli accent giving it a slightly French sound, the r’s swallowed. His eyes were dark but guileless. “I work at Council Travel. Not my life’s dream, but it’s a job, you know? I’m saving up money to maybe travel the world. Who knows.”

Meanwhile, Trevor was serving, ladling soup into bowls, and then handing them around. “This is efo,” he explained. “It’s a smoked fish soup.”

I tasted, dubiously. It was an acquired taste, but good too—hot and spicy and salty. “Yummy . . . What’s in it?” I asked.

Dov put a hand up in warning. “You don’t want to know.”

“Oh, please—tell me, Trevor. I’ve never tasted anything quite like it.”

Trevor, tilting his bowl to slide an unidentifiable piece of meat onto his spoon, said, “It is a dish full of surprises. For example, do you see that red feathery plant in the backyard?”

“Celosia,” I said. “My mom grows it in her garden too.”

“Yes, it is one of the ingredients. Also a few other items from the backyard.”

“Snails!” howled Dov, tickling the back of my neck with a cold hand. I shrieked in surprise, then hastily squelched my outburst, not wanting to be rude. “I would never have guessed,” I said lamely, chewing more slowly on the rubbery morsel in my mouth.

“Also, smoked fish, tomato, chilies . . .” Trevor enumerated.

“Thanks Trevor,” I said weakly. “For going to all that trouble. It must have been very labor intensive.”

“Especially the part where he had to catch the snails,” Dov said. “They tried to outrun him, but our man Trevor is fast.”

I snorted. “You remind me of my little brother,” I told Dov, and he smirked. The front door squeaked open. I turned to see Boris come in (when had he gone out?), bearing two enormous pieces of shiny blue construction paper. Nodding brusquely in our direction, he entered his room and slammed the door so hard the entire kitchen vibrated.

It was as if a ghost had shimmered through the kitchen, upsetting the easy balance. It took a moment to recover equilibrium; then Trevor brought over the next dishes. “This is ogbono. It’s a meat dish, very tender. And some okra, for the side. And rice.”

“No snails in that one,” said Dov in a stage whisper.

“Thank you, it looks delicious,” I said, and asked him, “I was wondering--how’d you end up here?”

“In my country, my father was a chief—a big man. But we did not have much money. And I had many brothers. I am the youngest. Not much left over for me. So I chose to come here. Maybe make a better life.” He sighed. “It has been a few months. And I like it here, but it is so cold. And job search is hard.”

“So what do you do,” I asked, “When you aren’t job searching?” I found my voice automatically falling into Trevor’s deliberate, rhythmic cadences.

“I run,” he said. “I run a lot.”

I looked around the table. There was Dov, being a typical messy guy, slurping meat and holding a beer at the same time. And bright-eyed sad Trevor, and me. Were we all here to escape being someplace else?

After dinner, Dov suggested drinks at the local pub, and I immediately agreed. We treated Trevor to a pint of bitter at the Lamb and Castle, a couple blocks away, and chatted idly. “Trevor sounds so British,” I said. “Are many Nigerian children named Trevor?”

He laughed, white teeth flashing. “No, actually! My real Nigerian name is AbdulRahman. But it is difficult to spell, and confusing. I would like to be called Trevor while I live here.”

“And you, Dov?” I asked. “Any secret names you want to fess up to?”

He opened his arms wide. “Dov Bar-Ilan. That’s me. What you see is what you get.”

I sipped my cider, letting it flow smoothly down my throat like water. “When I have a child, I’m going to name her something interesting. Alizarin. Or Viridian. A name no one else has.”

Trevor looked upset. “There is something to be said for fitting in with other people, though. Don’t you think? Will the children not laugh at your daughter, for her name?”

“You have a point. But I think the names are beautiful. They’re paint colors. Alizarin is this deep, deep crimson color. And viridian is a bright green. You can’t use them alone—they’re too bright. But if you mix each one with any other color, that color takes on an amazing depth. They’re two colors I can’t paint without.”

“Brilliant that you’re an artist,” said Dov. “That means you can really be one of us. Trevor and I have voted ourselves least likely to be gainfully employed this year.”

I reached into my purse and pulled out my new pack of cigarettes. Inhaling deeply, I said, “Thanks, glad to be part of the club.”

“There’ll be hazing later,” Dov warned, and Trevor cuffed his shoulder.

Eventually Dov extracted a deck of cards from his back jeans pocket. “Anyone up for poker?” he asked.

I stared blankly, as did Trevor. “Okay, you babies,” he groaned. “How about something simple—Crazy Eights?” I reached back into the recesses of my memory, and remembered childhood games. “Crazy Eights it is!” I enthused.

And there we stayed, till the pub closed at 11 pm, playing Crazy Eights, and Go Fish, and Gin Rummy, laughing, drinking pints of Guinness and cider. We played table hockey with the Strongbow Cider coasters, and as conversation lulled, I asked Dov curiously, “So, what will you do, really, after Council Travel? What’s next?”

He shrugged loosely, after several pints his words slurring, the soft consonants rounder and slower. “I dunno, girl. I just take it day by day, you know? Things will figure themselves out.”

Trevor nodded energetically. “I am always hoping. Hopeful. One tries one’s best.”

I swirled my cider, avoiding Trevor’s earnest look, his strained British pronunciation. How well would his British act work out for him? I wanted desperately to hope it would, for this kind man.

And I was convinced that at last, my luck had changed.