single qualification as a tutor was the ability to speak a language whose deep grammar I had acquired before I could independently use the toilet. But apparently Brazilians did this, they hired stray Americans as language tutors; the market proved that people would pay money for instruction from someone with no training. I assumed I was less expensive than someone with training. Michelle, one of the Wives, said she knew several American women who had picked up tutoring work this way. So it seemed these Brazilians never stopped to wonder if they could turn around and teach a foreigner Portuguese.
At our first lesson Marcos told me he was looking for “refinements.” He spoke as if I were a shopkeeper and refinements were a kind of tiny, hard-to-find screw he needed to fix his watch. The fact that he knew the word refinements suggested there was little I could do for him. I asked what the Portuguese was for refinements, and the word he used translated more literally to “perfectings.” Already, the lesson was facing the wrong way.
Late at night, prostitutes waited for men in cars to stop and roll down their windows. This would happen a few blocks from our apartment. The prostitutes were tall, with tight skirts, strong shoulders, long, smooth hair. They used to be men. One lived in her car; I often saw her in the daytime on the sidewalks, shouting at people. Once, as I walked past, she spoke to me. I’m sick, she said.
My husband sat in an armchair, reading. I was in theory reading as well, but I couldn’t concentrate, and kept looking at him. Of course, I’d spent much of the day reading already. My husband’s face made an expression of trying to shut out the world in order to focus on the words in front of him. I turned to a new page in my book, and he swiped to a new page in his. He sat with good posture. He had good genes. He exercised. I asked him to read aloud something from his book. “ ‘When the British tried to levy a hut tax—a tax of five shillings to be raised from every house—in January 1898, the chiefs rose up in a civil war that became known as the Hut Tax Rebellion,’ ” he said. It was a work of economic history that purported to explain the inequality among nations. I said: “Is it considered a civil war if they were rebelling against their colonizers?”
I performed virtually all the housework—it almost goes without saying. My husband didn’t ask it of me, and he made a nominal effort, but he was at work all day and I was at home all day, so. I had no instinct for it, no homemaker gene, which, whether you want to admit it or not, some women do in fact possess. Some women do not feel especially put upon to find themselves washing a husband’s underwear; I felt put upon. But I also felt the anxiety of the non-earner, of household dead weight, and so I washed my husband’s underwear without mentioning to him, or to anyone, how strange it made me feel. Perhaps this was the start of resentment; but to resent my husband, I would have had to believe he’d stolen me away from a career, a path I wanted, and of course that wasn’t the case at all. If it weren’t for my husband, I would have been in New York authoring a fresh tweet about an exciting new blended cement—blending your cement guards against bleeding and inhibits sulfate attack—made from supplementary cementitious materials such as fly ash, hydrated lime, and furnace slag.
In New York, I was spared, because of my husband and his job. I was spared a certain kind of apartment in a certain kind of marginal neighborhood, roommates scavenged from the Internet, furniture scavenged from the street—a shipwreck life. I knew those things, I had done those things; but not for as long as I should have. Splitting a two-bedroom apartment four ways, foldouts in the living room, and always avoiding the landlord. I knew people who lived like that. The people who lived like that told me about it over coffee, over drinks, my treat. I had friends who spent their waking hours in cafés, working on their novels, screenplays, art concepts, graphic designs. They inhabited colonies of people like themselves, all hunched forward slightly in front of laptop screens, seated in rows behind their shields of glowing apples. They gentrified. I should have been made to suffer more. I should have had to live with the moral knot of gentrification, of being one of the gentrifiers. Instead I had a view of the Hudson from an apartment in Tribeca that a real-estate agent had found. I should have been deprived, because of who I was and what I wanted, what I did not want, what I enjoyed; because of what I could and could not do. Could: write a coherent sentence, handle a first-declension Latin noun (e.g., latebricola, latebricolae —“one who lives in hiding”). Could not: conduct a regression analysis, code in Java or Python, handle tools, afford health insurance.
Marcos’s wife, Iara, made an effort to look after me. She once spent five months in San Diego studying English and had nothing but good things to say about America. She was a housewife, a mother, but the childcare they paid for seemed to take the sting out of motherhood; she was free during the days. One afternoon she took me to an exhibition of photographs at a gallery in Vila Madalena. The photographer was French. His subject was crowds—faces, bodies, community, anger. They were photographs of demonstrations and had simple titles: Beirut, Islamabad, Istanbul, Gaza, Sanaa. There were no dates. The titles of two photographs could have been switched without anyone knowing. It was impossible to distinguish the wailing women and rock-throwing men of one place from those of another.
The photographer’s trademark was close-up shots of groups. In his pictures you saw only faces, no surroundings. People filled the frame like paving stones. And they were gorgeous images. The photographer aestheticized rage and suffering. I supposed they didn’t resent the photographer’s presence: wailing and rock-throwing are acts of performance; demonstrators want to be photographed. The pictures felt familiar, the way every morning the newspaper feels familiar. You came away with the sense that political despair was a universal and permanent condition.
“This one looks a bit like you,” Iara said. Her finger hovered over the face of a woman near the front of a crowd. She had dark hair and skin, brown eyes, and was perhaps my age but in almost every other way was different from me. “I know she doesn’t look exactly like you,” Iara said, anticipating my objection, “but the shape of her face, the way her chin is like this, it reminds me of you. She is like the Palestinian protestor version of you.”
John Singer Sargent’s Madame X, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, always reminded me of my mother—of my mother not as I knew her from memory, but as I knew her from pictures taken in her youth. It hadn’t occurred to me previously that if Madame X (who in truth was a socialite named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, and whom Sargent painted when she was twenty-five years old, about the age I would have been when I first saw her portrait) resembled a previous edition of my mother, then she must, in some way, resemble me. I don’t believe in past lives. But for a long time I used to have the feeling that someone, somewhere, had already done whatever I was going to do.
Iara was looking at a photograph of a suffering child. “Just because it makes you feel something doesn’t mean it is art,” she said.
In our building there lived a boy of no more than nine or ten who wore the uniform of what I knew to be an excellent and expensive private school. He spoke eerily fluent English. He was like a little American boy. He asked questions when I saw him in the elevator. Sometimes I felt as if I were being interviewed. He had the glossy brown hair of a boy in a T.V. ad, the kind of large brown eyes that seduce parents into recklessness.
Marcos had recommended me highly, the man said. I had the impression that Marcos had said something else to him, that I was a kind of charity. “The American wife has time on her hands,” etc. The man’s office had quite a view: a deep, cinematic plunge into the heart of the city. Helicopters sailed along the axes of the skyline, floating at the limit of my eyesight, like ships on a horizon. A good number of high-rise apartment buildings in this part of the city had mansard roofs or other architectural elements from the past—the idea being to make those buildings look older than they really were.
Some people had a sincere desire to improve their English for professional reasons, or they had an intellectual love of language; for others, I came to understand, keeping an English teacher on the payroll was proof of status. And I came
