“Tell me,” she said, holding the smoke in her lungs and passing the joint over. “What is this actually about, for you?”
“What do you mean?”
She exhaled. “This whole thing, it’s not only about the studio. I mean, it’s fabulous, it’s delicious about the studio. It’s the best decision you’ve made in years. But you’d made up your mind before you went there, hadn’t you?”
I thought for a moment. “I guess I had.”
“So it’s not about the actual studio.”
“Then what’s it about?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
I shrugged, and laughed. I couldn’t say. There were not words to describe it; and no way, had there been the words, of not revealing too much. Even with Didi, I didn’t want to reveal too much. “I’m excited. Does it matter?”
She took another toke, narrowed her eyes. “We’ll have to wait and see, I guess.”
10
Remember this season. This dinner, this day, the signing of the lease, took place on the Saturday before the presidential election: John Kerry versus Dubya, in Dubya’s Round Two. This was the fall of 2004. The wider world was deeply fucked, and home also. Two American wars raging—bloodbaths each, bloodbath major and bloodbath minor, ugly, squirrelly hateful clandestine wars marked by betrayal, incompetence and corruption. Don’t get me started.
We’d had a young woman, a girl really, only twenty-five, come to the school the year before to speak about her NGO—she’d set it up herself, this frilly slip of a thing with her denim miniskirt and her silver-blue eye shadow, she’d lobbied Congress and gotten millions to do it, God knows how, barely out of college, and its purpose, to count the civilian casualties, seemed such a sane and good thing to do. She spoke about it for the kids in a very gentle way, in her high and breathy voice, about how she wanted to help everybody who got hurt, Iraqis the same as Americans, and that if you didn’t keep track, some folks might get forgotten. We had only the fifth and sixth graders go hear her, even so, because her job was counting bodies, basically, and however bright a gloss you put on that, you can’t go frightening the tinies and giving them nightmares. I thought it was pretty brave of Shauna to have her at all, but I guess she was the niece of someone on the school board, and she actually visited three schools that fall before she went away.
I couldn’t see how this kid could count for much, and then a couple of months later she was on the evening news, on CNN, in a headscarf with a clipboard and no eye shadow at all, and she was for real, and sober and impressive and she didn’t even say “like” once, and she was telling terrible stories about the numbers of Iraqis—children, families, old women—whose injuries and deaths were not being officially reported, but she was going door to door with her clipboard and with a dozen others she’d recruited, and they were doing damn good work.
And it was only about four months later that she was in the news again, The New York Times this time, a headline, small, right on the front and a picture on the fifth page, but with the eye shadow again, a picture taken before she went, obviously; and she was there because she and her translator had been in a car following an armored convoy on the infamous road to the airport, and some motherfucker blew them up with a rocket. And it said in the article (I will always remember this) that the last thing she said, when the soldiers came rushing to help her charred and seeping tender self splayed in the dust by the side of the road outside Baghdad, the last thing she said before she died was “I am alive.” She was twenty-six.
But she was alive, of course, she’d been more alive in that short space than many are in a lifetime; and then she was dead. I took the article to show Shauna, who gets only The Boston Globe, but the news had been in The Globe, too. We didn’t tell the kids, so one or two of them probably still sometimes think of her out there, counting the hurt and the dead, of whom there are still so many and whom she would be counting if she were still alive to count.
That’s what that time was like. And yet, through November, I greeted each morning as though it were spring,