Abandon (6 page)

“This was in L.A.?”

“Yes. But I imagined it was somewhere else.”

As she spoke, looking for what would connect them, and reaching out, in her way—he remembered how she’d invited him in for juice— he began to prepare a small speech in his head: “Look, you’re really sweet and charming, and I’m sure you have plenty of admirers, but I’m afraid . . .”

He was about to deliver the speech, but she was chattering on about her time in France and how she’d seen a cloud that made her think of being inside a whale, as if some instinct in her told her to keep talking, and to keep his speech at bay, and how she’d once played the lead in a local production of
Shadowlands,
the story of C. S. Lewis. The sense of imminence was everywhere: the clouds portending rain, the little lecture building up in his head, the hopes that she’d brought on even this brief drive, in her white dress, and makeup that sharpened blue-grey eyes.

“Look,” suddenly she cried, and again his talk was lost. “Can we go and explore?”

It was a pile of bricks in the outline of a room up above them, just faintly visible through the clouds, like an eerie relic of something else. More new lives being constructed on this fragile slope.

“I love abandoned houses. You can make them anything you want to.” And just behind the bright voice, some quality of wistfulness, as if she were trying to push down whatever it was she felt.

“I’m not sure it’s abandoned. It looks like it’s being built.” But already she was scrambling up the slope, unexpectedly nimble, holding her dress by the hem and moving as fast as if she were going off to one of the places she’d read about.

At the top, when they came to the house-to-be, she picked up a stone, a piece of brick, and looked around her at the emptiness. “I guess there’s still a lot of work to be done.”

“I think so.” He looked around for the place at which to deliver his sentences—he’d formed them perfectly by now—and then, unexpectedly, a face peeped out, out of the mist, and then another: two yellow-haired kids playing hide-and-seek around the corners of the unfinished house.

“This is ours,” said the little boy firmly. “Daddy says this is going to be my playroom.”

The little girl looked on in reverence.

“This is our home. Who are you?”

“We’re just exploring,” she said softly, not shy about putting herself down on their level.

“What’s your name?”

“Camilla.”

“What a funny name! I’m Skye and she”—he pointed to what was apparently his sister—“she’s Cloud.”

“Then it’s your day,” said Camilla, bending down so she wouldn’t be above the two of them. “A day of beautiful clouds. You must be the queen.”

The little girl beamed, glad to be on equal footing, and the boy ran off, upset, perhaps, to be no longer the center of attention, and she gave herself over to exploring the joinings of the brick with the girl. Crunchings, scramblings from the clouds told them the boy was not far away. It was as if a whole veil, of wariness and distrust, had fallen away from her, and when she stood up, smoothing her dress, her face was flushed with bright color, light.

“I think we should probably be leaving them to their games,” he said. “We don’t want to trespass on their dream.”

She scrambled down the slope in front of him, and he came after, trying not to fall, the words ready in his mind, and the first few specklings of rain prickling the windshield. When he started the car, she said, “Look,” and as the mist receded, giving way to rain, they saw other houses, in no set pattern, all around the hills, the slopes blackened in parts, from a recent fire, and the houses the reborn hopes of people who had lost everything they owned.

“I’m so happy here,” she said, a girl again after her game. “I’ve wanted to come here ever since I moved into Krissie’s house.”

He didn’t ask why she hadn’t, and as he prepared his opening lines—“You’re really nice . . .”—she said, “Tell me about you. I’ve been going on and on about myself. What about you?”

“Not much to tell.”

“You’re studying Rumi and Islam at the university. Why did you choose them?”

“I don’t know,” he said, searching for the right distance. “I suppose they’re everything we didn’t learn about in school.”

“Have you spent much time in the Middle East?”

“Not a lot. Enough. You?”

“I never go anywhere. But my sister, Krissie, travels. That’s how I know about the Sufis.”

They had almost come to Montecito now, and the houses had become more extravagant, Palladian villas, great country mansions set behind gates, all the many dreams people had brought and placed on the Pacific’s doorstep. As they descended, they drove into late sunlight, and because the day was darkening now, and he remembered he’d concocted an appointment in the evening, he said, “Is there anywhere you’d like to go?”

“Wherever you like the most,” she said, and he flinched at the unsought intimacy.

“The beach.” There’d be just enough time for him to deliver his regrets.

He parked by the chains on the dead-end road—the signs saying “Stop” and “No Trespassing” at every point, reminding them of the security companies shadowing their every move—and they went down the concrete ramp that leads onto the sand. The sun was off to one side now, and sinking fast, and the last few surfers were trudging up towards the road, wet dogs shaking themselves dry beside them.

When she stepped onto the beach, she took off her shoes and ran towards the sea, and again he was disarmed, as if he were keeping two people company at once: the heedless girl who, when she remembered where she was, put on a mask of knowingness. She brought him a shell where he sat on a rock, as if they were the kids they’d seen on the hill, and said, “Tell me about your studies. What’s the single best thing about them?”

“They make me believe, and they tell me of mystery.”

He hadn’t expected that; he hadn’t expected anything. Clearly, he was tired and the day had gone on a long time.

“Thank you. That’s beautiful.” She looked up at him with an expectant glow.

One of the first things he’d learned when he arrived in California was that everything was different in the pacing: he would be walking through a prologue while those around him were running towards Act IV. Everything changed fast here, like the weather in the hills, and people reached for things with the terror of souls not sure they’d ever see the chance again.

“What is it? You look shy.”

He was piecing the words together again, as the light faded, and the occasional faces that passed turned gold.

“Nothing.”

“It must be something.” She put her hands in front of her, in a pantomime of good behavior, and leaned forward: she stared at him beseechingly, teasingly, as if to prize out from him a boyhood secret.

“No, the thing is . . .”

“What?” she said, coaxingly.

“I’m taken.” He looked away from her expectant eyes, her glowing face, and realized that the words had come out wrong.

“You are? You’re taken with me?”

“No. I mean, you’re very charming and sweet, and I wish things were different . . .” Out at sea the lights were coming on around the oil derricks, so the far-off structures glowed like Christmas trees. The sky took on a rich dark blue, and looking out in this light, with few signs of the developed world, you could imagine yourself in some other place of navy shades and desert spaces.

“I mean, in different circumstances, I’m sure, but the thing is, I’m claimed.”

“Was it that obvious?”

“I think it was.”

She sat back.

“I appreciate it. No. Really. Thank you for telling me. It makes things a lot easier.”

“As I say, I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s much better you tell me now. I could have gotten hurt otherwise.”

It
was
better; but he saw her packing away her things with the exaggerated efficiency of a girl told that the expedition’s over, and it’s time to go home. He looked out to sea, to where the dark sky showed off the lights, and she followed his gaze.

“Is she very far away?”

“Far enough.”

“Then we’re okay?” And there was a hopefulness in her voice.

He said nothing, so she went on, “I understand. Really. I wouldn’t expect you not to be claimed.”

“Good.”

“I appreciate your honesty.”

“Good.”

They sat there, at something of a loss, and he did what he could not to look at where the lip gloss was wearing off, and the natural glow that had replaced the blusher was starting to fade. It was beginning to grow chilly—a wind coming in from the sea—and he remembered the evening appointments they’d both made up.

“I think we should be going.” Leaning over to kiss her lightly for goodbye.

They didn’t say anything as they drove back into town, but when he got off the freeway and started to approach her house, she said, “Thank you for giving me all this time. It means a lot.”

“It’s no problem. I’m happy to.”

“Maybe I’ll see you sometime at the university?”

“Maybe. I seem to spend all my life there these days.”

He pulled up to her driveway, easy to find now thanks to the dusty white car that looked as if it had driven across continents to arrive here. She sat in the passenger seat, making no movement towards the door.

“Well, I think my eight o’clock meeting summons.”

“Thank you for a perfect day,” she said, with more seriousness than he’d expected, and then got out.

As he turned round and drove away, he saw her standing in the driveway, in her white dress, looking for all the world like a child dropped off against her will after a custody weekend.

What is it about the Sufis that attracts you?” It was one of the many questions that he took to his desk the following morning, from the unexpected drive, unable to settle to the work he’d promised himself. He thought, for some reason, of winter afternoons in England, the sky so low and grey that it felt as if he were being conveyed to a tunnel that would never end. He thought about the Department, and the endless talk of careers and papers and openings and tenure tracks. He thought, for no reason he could formulate, of the men in the great hall in Damascus, their hands extended at their side, palms cupped as if to receive whatever the heavens sent down.

“You realize he’s the best-selling poet in America,” Sefadhi had said, the very first time they met, at the interview. “I’m drawn to him in spite of that,” he’d answered, and clearly it was the correct response, for six months later he was the professor’s prize pupil, working on Rumi. “Our mission,” the older man had said, in the slightly conspiratorial tone he favored, “is to smuggle a little of the Sufi light into the smog of California.” Neglecting, for the moment, the fact that Tehran is said to have the most polluted skies on earth.

“Keep it simple” was Sefadhi’s only advice for the presentation. “The point of the exercise is not to show off the details and originality of your research. It’s the opposite. Make these poets live for people who know very little about them.”

Outside his window, the ocean was foaming and pooling around the rocks, and the summer fog erased almost everything: it gave a forlorn air to the strip of beach, as if the world had left it behind somehow and would never come back to collect it. He looked out into the mist and tried to recover the person who’d known nothing of the poets until Martine gave him the book of Rumi translations the last night in Istanbul, an undergraduate’s token of love.

“The Sufis,” he wrote quickly, “so-called for the rough woollen gown they wear, or
suf
—emblem of their austerity, their voluntary poverty, their anonymity—were a small group of Moslems who began to gather in groups, often secretly, at the beginning of the eighth century, soon after the Prophet’s death. Their aim, quite simply, was to find a direct path to the divine, without the mediation of any Imam or cleric. Their goal was not to conquer the world, but to conquer themselves.”

It was the most agonizing thing in the course, after all these years, to try to reduce the figures he’d been studying into formulae: whatever had stirred him, years ago, had had nothing to do with the Islamic history he’d known nothing about. But the point of the seminar, as Sefadhi had stressed, was to keep all real knowledge out of it—“pretend as if you’re meeting them for the first time.”

“Because they opposed everything around them, they always had the air of a secret group: in Shia countries, such as Iran, they are a minority group in a minority sect that has always defined itself by its opposition to the norm—the word ‘Shiite,’ as you know, means ‘partisan.’ And so I might best present them to you by telling you what they are not. For the Sufi, God exists not only in the mosque or madrasa; He is everywhere, not least inside our hearts. The jihad that all good Moslems undertake (and, as you also know, I’m sure, the word means ‘struggle’ or ‘aspiration,’ with none of the associations of ‘holy war’ the networks always mention), the Sufi sees as internal: his goal is to suppress the infidel within. The Sufi ideal is one of love, but it is not the love of the compassionate mother, or of Jesus, he speaks of; it is the ravenous, consuming eros of the lover inflamed.”

How does one begin to describe fire? Describe its effects, perhaps, the light it throws off in the dark. He thought of the blackened hills they’d driven through the day before, and the houses bravely coming up in the mist; he thought of her, recovering hope enough to run into the surf as if she were a child again.