Man of the Hour Page 3

  “No, it’s not Larry,” said Donna. “It’s a blast from the past. I told him he could wait at your desk.”

  “Thanks, Ms. Vitale.”

  He started to move past her, but she caught his elbow “I also wondered if I could talk to you about coming over for dinner next week,” she said softly.

  He stopped short, flattered but awkward, suddenly feeling like a bashful ape. How did women handle this kind of attention? “Um, can I get back to you on that, Donna?”

  “You got the number.”

  He wondered if he was missing a great opportunity here, waiting to see if he could still work things out with Renee. Ms. Vitale was smart, she had ballast, and something about her suggested a kind of rowdy availability. You could imagine sitting up in bed, drinking beer with her.

  “But don’t wait too long, David.” She brushed by him on her way to the Xerox room. “I might not be around forever.”

  He continued on into the office. A narrow little blue room, off a main corridor, with a dozen desks for the twenty teachers in the English department. The junior staffers were expected to roam like nomads and put their papers and books down on any surface that happened to be clear, while the senior teachers hunkered down and defended their areas like mangy old primates. Three students loitered inexplicably by the water fountain and a work-crew guy stood on a ladder pulling down parts of the ceiling, looking for God knows what hazardous materials. A tattered print of Edvard Munch’s The Scream adorned a wall above an overstuffed file cabinet, and a group of painters stood around with dripping rollers, trying to freshen the room up for the governor’s visit.

  The visitor was sitting in David’s chair, studying the papers on top of his desk and the placard above it with the Melville quote God keep me from ever completing anything.

  What did that mean? Nasser wondered. He’d never trusted this one, this Mr. Fitzgerald, with his patient smile and unruly brown hair. He’d sat in the back of his class for a whole term, too bored yet too intimidated to speak up. Feeling the work was both above him and beneath him. Not understanding most of what was said; not getting the jokes; not liking the fact that he’d been left back once already and was older than most of the other students. And especially not liking it when Mr. Fitzgerald would call on him in class, asking him to explain what he thought of The Great Gatsby or The Deerslayer or some other immoral American book. It was humiliating, like being stripped naked in front of the other students. He stammered and stuttered, wanting to crawl under his chair, while this man read him immoral poems and tried to force him to think and speak in an uncomfortable way.

  He’d dropped out soon after that. But there was another part of Nasser that was confused, being back here. The weaker part that needed to talk to someone about the things he’d seen. He remembered how he’d watched other students talk to Mr. Fitzgerald, sharing jokes and intimate secrets after class, and how he’d wished he could unburden himself to someone that way.

  “It’s Nasser, right?” David set down his bag and offered his hand, grateful for the excuse to ignore the pink phone message from Visa lying amid the piles of uncorrected papers from his five classes on his desk.

  The thought of the $2,500 he owed on his credit card made the back of his neck ache.

  The visitor looked up, startled, with luminous brown eyes, just like his sister’s. “I am surprised for you to remember me.” His handshake was limp and cautious.

  “Sure, I remember almost all my students.”

  Not that he’d done much worth remembering, this Nasser. Just sat in the back, looking pissed off all term. There was a certain number of kids like him every year, maybe twenty, thirty percent. The unreachables. Who either didn’t speak the language or just didn’t give a damn. After all these years, David accepted that triage went on in the classroom. You helped the ones who were going to make it and made the best deal you could with the ones who wouldn’t. And once in a while, you found a gem in the gravel. There’d be a kid like Kevin Hardison, of no special promise, yet somehow you could find a way to buff him up and make him shine. You could signal him that there were life and ideas and mystery on the other side of the great divide of adulthood; it wasn’t all just driving on the expressway, flipping burgers at Mickey D.’s, and selling drugs on the corner. High school was the last chance at true democracy, where everyone stood more or less equal. So you went to the wall for these kids. You bought extra books for them, went to their Friday-night basketball games, talked to the social workers when they had problems with their parents, took their phone calls from Rikers when they got in trouble with the law.

  He’d offered to give this Nasser mat kind of attention, thinking he’d seen something unusual in him. But the boy had stalked out before they could even make an appointment.

  The real enigma here was how this Nasser’s little sister, Elizabeth, could then turn out to be one of the best students he’d ever had.

  David pulled over an empty chair and sat down. “So how have you been, anyway? What have you been up to?”

  “I am good. I am very good. I am excellent, in fact” Nasser pulled on his tie nervously. “I am driving for the car service. I am doing very well. I’m making the money.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Sounds like your English is better now too.”

  “Is still very difficult for me.” He rolled the tie around his finger and stared out at the patriotic bunting draped in the halls, pride and embarrassment wrestling on his face.

  “So the governor is coming next week—to share his sincere concern with the children and teachers of this state, no doubt.” David brought his chair close so they were almost knee-to-knee, like passengers on a train. “What brings you back? You thinking about getting your GED?”

  The boy looked over to meet David’s eyes. “No,” he said. “But I have something very serious to discuss.” The tie unrolled, the Adam’s apple bobbed behind the buttoned collar. “I must talk to you about my sister.”

  “Elizabeth?”

  Nasser put his briefcase flat across his lap, almost defensively.

  “What about her?” asked David. “She’s terrific. She’s a world-beater. She got fifteen hundred on her SATs. She can write her own ticket to any college she wants.”

  “This is not appropriate. For a girl like this to write her ticket.”

  “Why not?”

  Nasser frowned, straightened his tie, and picked at his raggedy briefcase. So much tension. David thought about offering him a cup of coffee, but then decided he’d better not. The kid was wired enough already.

  “A girl like this should stay home and make a good marriage,” Nasser said firmly. “A girl like this should help raise a Muslim family.”

  A part of David rebelled, hearing that. Why did everyone want to control these kids and put them in a box? Sometimes it felt like half his job was breaking these boxes open.

  But he tried to finesse the point here. “Well, what makes you think she can’t get married if she goes to college?” he said, opening up his big palms.

  “No.” Nasser shook his head vigorously. “This will not work. There are things in the world.”

  “Things?”

  “Bad things. Things she shouldn’t be exposed to. The immorality and lasciviousness. I drive around this neighborhood, I see the drugs and prostitutes on the boardwalk. Every day, girls like this are raped in the newspaper. People are shot for being in the wrong place. For no reason at all. This is a terrible thing.”

  As Donna Vitale squeezed between them with a wink, a pile of secondhand Jane Eyres in her arms, David found himself uncomfortable with all this brotherly interest. It wasn’t unusual, traditional families not wanting their kids to go out into the world. Some of it was just cultural differences. But occasionally he wondered if the relatives secretly wanted to hold the kids back so they could feel better about their own lives.

  “Can I ask why you’re the one who’s talking to me about this and not your parents?” David furrowed his brow and leaned in so clo
se his shoulder almost touched Nasser’s ear.

  Nasser reared back from the contact. “Our mother is dead,” he said, greatly agitated. “Someone has to look out for my little sister.”

  “So what about your father? I talked to him last year.” David found himself wanting to defend the old man after hearing Elizabeth’s story.

  “My father.” Nasser pursed his lips and pulled hard on his tie. “My father is not the one to protect my sister. He is married to an American woman with no morals and he has daughters with her who are allowed to eat pork and watch filth on television! I’m sorry to say this to you, but it is the truth. My father is not a devout man. He tries, but it is not enough. Someone else has to be responsible.”

  Then all at once, Nasser fell quiet, turning and looking out into the hall.

  His sister had just walked by with her best friend, Merry Tyrone, a stylish black girl who wore short skirts and chunky shoes and didn’t like people knowing how smart she was.

  “You see this?” Nasser clapped his hands in frustration. “She’s not wearing her hijab today.”

  “Her what?” asked David.

  “Her head scarf. This is what a proper Muslim girl should be wearing.”

  “Oh.” David looked down at the top of Nasser’s head, as if trying to see inside it. “Come on, Nasser. Your sister’s a good kid. She’s not going to get in any trouble.”

  “Oh no? Look at this.” Nasser started to dig through his briefcase. “Look what I find in her room.”

  He began pulling things out. A copy of Cosmopolitan, a J. Crew catalogue, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Color Purple with various sections dog-eared and underlined in red ink. Her permission slip for Tuesday’s field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  “You see?” he said. “Haram. Haram. Haram!” He pointed to each item. “None of this is permitted.”

  Haram. The word sounded like an engine revving. David sat back as if he’d just gotten a faceful of fumes.

  “Nasser, I don’t know what to tell you.” He sighed, arching his chin at the ceiling and rubbing his throat with a knuckle. “This is the modern world. I don’t like everything about it either, but you can’t put on blinders and pretend it doesn’t exist.”

  “But don’t you see how this is harmful to a young girl?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” David didn’t want to say he’d assigned some of the reading himself. “Do you think it’s possible you’re overreacting a little?”

  “No, this is not possible.”

  David watched Nasser’s fingers slip between his shirt buttons, as if he were trying to control some terrible pressure building up inside of him. So tight, so held in. Did he want to say something else?

  “Really, Nasser. I think it’ll be okay.” He tried to sound reassuring.

  “So you don’t help me keep her home from college?” Nasser asked with glistening, almost brimming eyes. “Is that it?”

  David saw he was wrong about this guy. Before, he’d suspected Nasser was merely jealous of his sister’s grades, her ease in assimilating. But something larger was at stake: here was a young man genuinely frightened by the late twentieth century. In fact, David remembered, that had been Nasser’s problem as a student. He was too scared to step outside his familiar frame of mind and try out new ideas.

  “I’m afraid I can’t make anybody do anything they don’t want to do,” David told him. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you wanted to discuss?”

  He studied Nasser’s face again. Amazing. Brother and sister hardly looked anything alike, except for the eyes. Most days, Elizabeth looked like a regular could-be-anything New York City girl, if you ignored the head scarf. But Nasser had an unmistakable Old World heaviness, as if he’d just come off the streets of Bethlehem. Even their first names sounded as though they came from opposing cultures.

  “No, nothing else is important.” Nasser loaded his sister’s things back into his briefcase. “I am disappointed. I hoped you would help.”

  Every year, they come and go with the tides, David thought once more. The kids. Young, then not young. Some you save, some you don’t. Like a lifeguard.

  “I’m sorry, Nasser. It’s a free country. I mean, I respect your beliefs and I’ll look out for your sister the way I’d look out for any of my students. But people are entitled to make their own mistakes.”

  “No, I don’t think this is so.” He snapped his briefcase shut and stood.

  David started to offer him his hand, but Nasser was distracted again, looking at the Melville quote over the desk.

  “And this is not right either,” he said, jabbing the placard with his finger. “A man should finish anything he starts.”

  3

  “WHAT’S THE MATTER?” Youssef was asking.

  “Nothing.” Nasser shrugged, not meeting his eye. “Why do you ask?”

  “I see you looking very … dog-face.”

  They were leaning against the Plymouth, eating lunch outside the Temple Mount All-Halal Deli on Atlantic Avenue, across the street from a Pentecostal church and a bail bondsman’s office. To people driving by, they looked like a couple of Brooklyn cab drivers brown-bagging it on a hot, sooty afternoon, not warriors planning the next stage of jihad.

  “Are you still worrying about this thing we do at the check store?” Youssef bit into his falafel sandwich.

  “No … well … of course not.”

  For the past few days, Nasser had been haunted by the memory of the robbery. He still kept seeing the woman falling away from life and the child with his tinfoil badge. But he was afraid to show any sign of weakness in front of his mentor.

  “It’s my sister, sheik,” he said, trying to change the subject.

  “What about her?” Youssef looked over. He’d always taken a strong interest in Elizabeth, staring at her in long, admiring silence the two times they’d met.

  “I went to her school today.” Nasser fidgeted. “I am very worried about what goes on there.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, this is a very bad place,” said Nasser. “No one is taught any respect for God. The girls dress like whores and the boys talk like hoodlums. As if this is normal. I tell you, sheik, I’m scared to death about how this will affect her.”

  He stopped and stared at the House of Detention down the street. Somehow, the killings the other night and his sister’s well-being had become linked in his mind. A wild uncertainty hovered over him, as if something terrible were about to befall him or someone he loved as retribution.

  “Yes, it’s terrible.” The Great Bear set down his sandwich on a bed of wax paper and took out a twenty-ounce bottle of Diet Coke. “A great judgment awaits them all.”

  The great judgment. The phrase made Nasser’s stomach lurch as he took a wedge of pita bread out of his own bag. “And then they are having the governor come to see them,” he went on. “As if it’s okay with him too. The things that go on.”

  “The governor is coming to this school?” Youssef abruptly straightened up.

  “Yes, next week, I think.” Nasser tore at the bread absently, molding the dough into little balls.

  He felt the Great Bear’s weight shift against the car. A city bus moved by slowly and Nasser watched a damp, half-dressed model on all fours smile invitingly from an underwear ad on its side. She looked as if she’d been recently savaged and was ready for another go.

  “Why does the governor come into the school?” Youssef had become alert and attentive, his eyes flicking up and down Nasser’s face.

  “I don’t know, sheik.” Nasser searched his bag for tahini to dip his bread in. “I was there to talk to my sister’s teacher. I’m very worried about the things they’re putting in her mind.”

  He was aware that something in the conversation had changed. For the past six months or so, he’d been Youssef’s little acolyte. But now he had something of value to the Great Bear, though he had no idea what it could be.

  “So did you look into the feasibility?” Youssef le
aned in close and gripped Nasser’s puny arm.

  “The feasibility?”

  “Of what we talked about,” Youssef said harshly. “Of putting the hadduta there.”

  Nasser felt a slight tremor in his eyelids as the model on the passing bus seemed to wink at him.

  “You remember this, right?” Youssef belched and covered his mouth. “We never say the word ‘bomb’ from now on. In case anyone is listening. We call it the hadduta. Like a fairy tale.”

  A Budweiser truck going by hit a pothole, and three thousand bottles rattled ominously.

  “Well, I hadn’t considered it.” Nasser pushed back against the car with his buttocks, feeling defensive. “I was there to talk about my sister.”

  “You didn’t consider it?” said Youssef. “In a week, the governor is coming to the school—this one who is running for President—and you didn’t consider putting the hadduta there? All this time, we are talking, talking, talking, about jihad. About what we can do for jihad. We have almost three thousand dollars left over from the caravan raid and we still have the blasting caps I took from the demolition site last year. And you didn’t consider putting the hadduta there? What’s the matter with you? Have you lost heart?”

  He burped again and looked around, annoyed, as if someone else was responsible.

  Nasser stared after the departing bus, wondering if he had, in fact, lost heart. It had all started casually back in the spring, waiting around between calls at the American Way Car Service on Flatbush Avenue. Nasser was just a boy then, it seemed, still lost and confused in this new country, pumping quarter after quarter into the Baywatch pinball game. And then one night, Youssef spoke up, this big older man who’d been sitting in the corner reading the Koran and eating sandwiches night after night: “The Prophet says that when you see a wrong action, you should try to change it first with your hands, then with your words, and finally with your heart. Stop putting money in that accursed machine.”