was coming home from a party too, it turned out. Her friend Raoul . . .
“Raoul? Who’s Raoul?”
“You met him, he came to the salon a couple of times.” No hair parlor this but a group of writers who met in a bar in the Tenderloin. When the salon started, a year earlier, there had been a lot of them, but as people found work or left the city their number shrank, until the salon became a group of bar friends like any other, who played pool and gossiped and argued about who owed whom a drink. I didn’t remember anyone named Raoul. “He works for Petopia, the pet-supply people,” Alice said. “He wants me to write copy for them.”
“How glamorous,” I said.
There was a beat of silence. “I just called to see if you were all right,” Alice said. “Not so you could cut me down.”
“I’m sorry.” Beat. “Was it a good party?”
“It wasn’t bad. There weren’t enough people and there was too much to drink.”
“And this Raoul, he’s a nice guy?”
“Will you be jealous if I say yes?”
“Not at all,” I lied. “I want you to be happy.”
“I don’t know,” Alice said. “I feel like I’m floating. You know? It’s like I’m floating in the dark, in a sensory-deprivation tank, and nothing I see is really happening.”
“Maybe it’s just that we’re drunk.”
“Maybe. But,” beat, “I just feel like that’s what we’re all doing now. Like we’re all just, like, floating.”
Beat. “Maybe we are.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish you were here.”
“I’ll be back,” I said.
“And what’s going to happen then?” Alice asked.
“I guess we’ll find out then.”
“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “It’s the middle of the night there, isn’t it? Make sure you drink some water before you go to bed.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
Beat. Beat.
LOST THINGS
My uncle was back early the next morning, making things move in the kitchen like an angry ghost. I groaned and wrapped the quilt around my head. He asked what had happened to me, and I said I’d been hit by a car.
Charles laughed. “I know that car.”
He made coffee, and when it was ready he shook my shoulder. Instant. Charles pointed at me with his mug. “So, you were just drinking by yourself, or what?”
“I was at the Regenzeits’.”
“Ah, our enemies,” my uncle said.
I felt dull and sick to my stomach. I wished Charles would leave so I could go back to sleep, and in fact I didn’t know what he was doing, coming over when the sky was still green with presunrise light. Did he think that the world was full of people like him, angry men who drank bad coffee at dawn?
“Why are they our enemies?” I asked.
“Because they’re Turks, that’s why. The Turks are an Oriental people. They’ve hated us ever since the beginning.”
“Turkey is a Westernized democracy. It’s even a member of NATO.”
“Believe what you like, the history speaks for itself. Think about the Ottoman Empire.”
“The Ottoman Empire ended just after the First World War. Anyway, Kerem and Yesim were born in America.”
“But they remember,” Charles said, “they all remember that we won. The Americans and the Western Europeans.”
“That’s not true, the Ottoman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy. That, and the rebellion of the so-called assimilated peoples.” I couldn’t believe I was discussing the fall of the Ottoman Empire at dawn in Thebes with a bad hangover.
“Assimilated peoples, my ass, it was us. We won, on account of our superior military technology.”
“You must be thinking of the Cold War, although even there—”
“You don’t get it,” Charles interrupted. “Snowbird is their revenge.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “Snowbird is a ski resort, and this is the late twentieth century. You aren’t going to convince me that Joe Regenzeit and his family have been holding a grudge ever since Mustafa Pasha’s defeat at the gates of Vienna, or, even if they did, that they would take their revenge here, in Thebes.”
Charles growled at me that I didn’t understand a damn thing about Thebes, and I said I understood enough, Thebes was just a small town in the mountains that no one cared about, and there were more important things happening in the big world, and wasn’t it time to think about something else, and he said, what something else did I mean, which something else did I want him to think about, when every day they ruined Thebes a little more, and the old families were dying out, and people were tearing the old houses down and building Swiss chalets, and a barn sold for two hundred thousand dollars, a barn, and I said, you wanted to move to California anyway, don’t tell me that you love Thebes, and he said, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want this place to die, and I said, it wasn’t dying, and he said, you don’t know what dying is, then he started coughing in a way that left little doubt that on this subject at least his knowledge was vastly greater than mine.
“Do you want some water?” I asked.
He waved me away, stood up and went into the kitchen. I heard him washing his coffee cup. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he shouted.
“Packing up the house,” I said.
“Then pack up the house, and don’t get mixed up with people who hate us.”
The screen door banged shut. I sat in the living room, hurt by my uncle’s words. Was he really so confused, I wondered, that he thought the Regenzeits were out to get us? It was ridiculous. People like Charles were the problem, I thought, intolerant people who can’t let go of the past.
After a while, I went up to my mothers’ room and opened one of Celeste’s trunks. It was full of magazines and newspapers heaped up roughly according to size, the raw materials of her work. What the Rowlands had accumulated, Celeste cut up: worn back numbers of Scribner’s Magazine, McClure’s, Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, mixed in with issues
