“massacre”—I’d absorbed something, after all, by osmosis. But I couldn’t have explained what the massacre involved or even who was massacred, and I certainly couldn’t have told you that the civil war lasted fifteen years. As I read about it, I felt I should have known—I was a schoolteacher, for God’s sake, and Reza was a child in my class! Sirena had mentioned once about Skandar losing a brother in the war—hadn’t she said bombings?—but then again, I didn’t know all the facts about Vietnamese boat people (some of our kids were the children or grandchildren of boat people), and I couldn’t have given you a proper rundown on the history of Haiti, even though we had Haitian kids at Appleton; and we’d had a boy from Oman and there was a girl now in fourth grade from Liberia, and I would’ve had to Google that to know the first facts beyond where it was located on the map, and in all the year she was in my classroom, I never had. I thought then that maybe Sirena was right about the cotton wool of my American life, that I’d been swaddled and protected from the world. This was a Fun House of its kind, this strange place of safety into which 9/11 could erupt as if from nowhere, as if without logic, to our utter surprise.
Already liberated into what seemed an anti–Fun House reality of the emotions—a knowledge of love—and then on the cusp of my artistic freedom also, I longed now, too, for the expansion of my intellect. I wanted already to have known about such things as Hariri’s assassination, to be able to make some sense of them. It was like my World Book of Wonders, only better, and worse: the complexity, the enormity of the world was suddenly briefly apparent to me, a giant looming object in the periphery of my vision. Almost too big, but not quite. It was there, and I wanted to know it.
My walks with Skandar unfurled with the spring. After the February break, we proceeded side by side and the evening return became a small social event, a natural time for conversation. The distance between their house and my house became too short for our discussions, so we expanded our walks. The first time this happened we stood for ten minutes on my doorstep, and while I felt it would be strange to invite him in, we were both cold and growing numb. Finally he said, “Shall we walk a little more, to finish our talk but also stay warm?” And then we walked four times around the block before finally he agreed that he’d better be going. That was only the beginning. The next time we walked up to the Hi-Rise bakery and back. And each time farther and farther. Over to Harvard Square, and back in a loop that practically passed by their front door again. The walk that finally felt we were breaking an unspoken rule didn’t come until the end of April—a rule-breaking time, in the same week as my solo Edie Sedgwick impersonation. Spring was in the air, that soft feeling against the cheek and the nubs of bright leaves on the branches, rustling about. We tramped all the way to Watertown and up through the edges of Belmont and back. We walked for over an hour and a half, along empty streets—it was a weeknight, near midnight—beneath the pinkish streetlights and the breathing branches, our talk punctuated by rare lone cars. In my mind, it seemed significant that we never crossed the river. He never took my arm. We never touched at all.
As far as I know, he didn’t pretend to Sirena that he was walking by himself. As far as I know, she knew we were walking together. She never mentioned it. Once when I referred to something Skandar had talked about, she waved her hands as if warding him off and said, “So much talk! I love him, but he’s always talking—jabber, jabber. You’re so good to listen. Sometimes I say to him, ‘Skandar, it’s too bad there isn’t a job that’s just talking. That would be the job for you.’ ”
“He could be a talk show host.”
“You think it’s funny, but he couldn’t do it. A talk show host listens, no? A talk show host is listening, but Skandar is just talking. No, for a job he’d need to be a talk show guest.” She giggled. “But this isn’t a job.”