Correspondents Read online

  CORRESPONDENTS

  Tim Murphy is the author of Christodora, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. He has reported on health, politics, and culture for twenty years, for such publications as POZ magazine, where he was an editor and staff writer, Out, the New York Times, and New York magazine. He lives in Brooklyn.

  Also by Tim Murphy

  Christodora

  The Breeders Box

  Getting Off Clean

  CORRESPONDENTS

  TIM MURPHY

  PICADOR

  First published 2019 by Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic, New York

  First published in the UK in paperback 2019 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

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  ISBN 978-1-5290-2040-3

  Copyright © Tim Murphy 2019

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  To the Ackareys

  A fish said to another fish, “Above this sea of ours,

  there is another sea, with creatures swimming in it—

  and they live there, even as we live here.”

  The fish replied, “Pure fancy! Pure fancy!

  When you know that everything that leaves our sea

  by even an inch, and stays out of it, dies.

  What proof have you of other lives in other seas?”

  —Kahlil Gibran, The Forerunner

  PROLOGUE

  MAHRAJAN

  LABOR DAY WEEKEND, 2008

  Before everything changed that afternoon, Rita Khoury had been so happy that she’d finally stopped thinking about unhappy people elsewhere. The night before, in a mid-priced chain hotel off I-84 in central Connecticut, she and Jonah Gross had had incredibly gratifying sex before falling asleep in each other’s arms on cool sheets as the A/C lowed. The next morning, after showers and coffee, Rita felt a warm buzz of contentment while sitting in the passenger seat of Jonah’s Mini Cooper on the Mass Pike heading east. At a certain point after Worcester, she realized that not once that morning had she observed a stray object aside the road and tensed, thinking it was perhaps an IED or the charred corpse of a dog, goat, or child. She understood this to mean that she was unusually relaxed, Jonah’s right hand in hers on her knee as his left maneuvered the wheel.

  She was both eager and anxious to go the mahrajan, to reintroduce Jonah to her sister and present him for the first time to her mother, her nephew and niece, and, of course, to Bobby and the high-tech leg that had replaced his real one. She hadn’t been to a mahrajan in nine years, and while one part of her thrilled to join the line of dancers—something that had filled her childhood heart with a sense of the exotic world that awaited her beyond Massachusetts—another part was reminded of the constraining flatness of childhood, the tyranny of day trips in the back seat of the car (relieved only by a book), the feeling that provincial adolescence would never end and that the big, dazzling universe would never, ever unfold before her.

  Funny, she considered, she’d always thought that the first boyfriend she’d bring to the mahrajan one day would be Sami. There would be a comforting sense that the dancing, the food, the old ladies gossiping in Arabic with their startling glottal stops every few syllables wouldn’t be strange and new to him, that she wouldn’t have to do much cultural translating. You’re about to see Arabic culture distilled through a hundred years of a Boston accent and mostly Republican politics, she’d have told Sami, and he’d have said, Well, fair enough, you’ve seen your share of Arabic culture distilled through a bunch of French bourgeois snobs, and they would have both laughed and had a wonderful time dancing dabke and drinking arak with her relatives, who—that one prior time they had met Sami, the Christmas of 2002, before the invasion—had found him handsome and impossibly sophisticated, with his French accent and all the places he’d lived.

  But, of course, all that had been before she’d sabotaged herself. And it so happened that the first boyfriend she was bringing to this festival that figured so strongly in her earliest memories was, like her, an American and, unlike her, Jewish.

  And now Jonah squeezed her hand twice and said, “So, hey. Tell me more about your people you’re about to drag me into.”

  How to explain the Lebanese Maronites of Boston’s North Shore? When she thought of her father’s people en masse, she always thought first of their eyes, dark and soft and kind and looking a bit heartbroken, even if the person in question was not, with inky smudges beneath them, suggesting fatigue and defeat, even if, again, such was not the case. Then pair those eyes, those supple olive faces, with a Boston accent, full of dropped Rs and that adenoidal flatness, as though invisible fingers were pinching the nose shut.

  To her, such faces had always signified family and home, security and prosperity. But seeing similar faces in Iraq had provoked other feelings in her. How could a face look so familiar yet also be a portal to poverty, displacement, terror, despair, bottomless depression, trauma, rage—and, finally, empty resignation? How often she had watched the warmth, the hospitality in such faces at war with the suspicion, the bone-deep anger, the spiritual exhaustion.

  So now, to Jonah, she merely said, “Lebanese Maronites were mountain peasants a hundred years ago, totally looked down on by the Beirut elite, who were Sunni or Orthodox. But here in the U. S. they’ve all become doctors and lawyers and bankers and business owners. So they made out okay.”

  Jonah laughed. “They sound pretty much like the Jews of northern Westchester County.”

  “They are basically Jews,” she said. “They love Israel.”

  “They do?”

  “Of course,” she said sharply. “But since 9/11, all they want is to fit in and not have Americans think of them as Arabs or Muslims.”

  Jonah gave her the side-eye. “Your voice is escalating.”

  She laughed. “I know. But I get annoyed at Arab Americans who try to fly under the radar.”

  “You mean literally? Going through security at the airport?”

  She laughed and brushed away his hand on her knee. She loved his dry, fucking-with-you sense of humor. “Just drive,” she commanded.

  They’d been on a rather desolate industrial strip off the highway, but now they found themselves in downtown Lawton, driving through the grid of what could be so many Northeastern former factory towns, an array of peeling, triple-decker homes, late-Victorian dark-brick hulks of churches and schools, storefront
s with grand old engraved signage reading Woolworth or Feinstein’s Apparel, then, in their windows, plywood or tin placards reading comida latina or abogado y agente de bienes raÍces. A few buildings, like a library and a municipal office, were clad in early1970s Brutalist concrete, gray facades scarred now with graffiti and grime.

  They passed under an archway sign, slightly the worse for wear, reading lawton: immigrant city & birthplace of labor rights.

  Jonah read the sign aloud. “Really?”

  “It’s true,” Rita said, shaking her head and smiling. “Well, I don’t know about birthplace. But one of the greatest mill-worker strikes in the world happened here in 1912 when the workers’ hours were cut. About twenty thousand workers from countries all over Europe walked out.” Rita got emotional and proprietary when talking about this strike, as she had since she was eleven, when, obsessed with it, she’d written a history paper on it.

  “But then,” she continued, “the textile industry here dried up, right around when Puerto Ricans moved here, and the long-timers blamed the Puerto Ricans for ruining the city and moved out, and then the Dominicans and the Southeast Asians moved here, and with no jobs anymore it became the drug capital of northern New England. And now it’s the poorest city in Massachusetts, and the schools are in receivership, and families like mine will only come here once in a blue moon for something like the mahrajan, and they’re scared their cars will be stolen. And voilà, that’s what you’re seeing around you now. The once great and mighty Lawton.”

  “It’s like an old Hudson River town,” Jonah commented.

  “Except without the trendy hipster renaissance.”

  “Mm.”

  “But it is where I’m from,” Rita said. “I mean really from. My family. Much more than the suburbs.” She pointed up ahead to the left. “That’s the church.” She rolled down the car windows. “Listen, you can hear the music.”

  Jonah nodded appreciatively. “I feel like we’re going to a souk.”

  They pulled into the parking lot of a sandstone church with an asymmetrically peaked roof and an air of having been built during the Nixon administration. The facade bore an enormous mosaic of a black-haired, large-nosed Jesus, arms outstretched, two-dimensional and with a stylized nimbus around his head, in a Byzantine style, mountains in the distance.

  Jonah laughed. “Now that’s a Jewy-looking Jesus! Oh yes! I’m gonna like this.”

  “That’s the genuine Sephardic Jesus,” Rita noted. “And you’re right,” she added, kissing Jonah on the nose. “He does look a bit like you.”

  On the far side of the parking lot was a very large tent, crowded with people, from which wafted the scent of grilled meat and spices. Live music throbbed, all hand drums and synthesizer keyboards meant to sound like an oud. A man’s voice wailed in Arabic over the instrumentation.

  Rita’s face lit up in recognition. “Oh, listen! This is a very famous song. It’s called ‘Ana Wel Habib.’ Me and my love. ”

  “Anna well habib,” Jonah parroted her.

  “Just give me a sec.” She pulled down the mirror over the passenger seat in the car, extracted lipstick and eyeliner from her bag. She’d never much cared about her looks or fashion, but over the years she’d learned to make at least half an effort, certainly in group settings, and particularly when with her mother. She’d started coloring over the wiry gray strands that had begun popping out of her dark curly hair, watched what she ate and how much wine she drank, managed to exercise every few days, bought a few fashionable new things to wear every season. Most nights she moisturized half-heartedly. That was about the length to which she went in terms of self-presentation. When they first met her, most people thought she was black Irish, half-Italian perhaps, and couldn’t account for a certain deep-set intensity in her eyes and a modest but noticeable bridge in her nose. Arabs however, often asked, Inti Arabi? and she’d smile and answer, Nus, half. Certain half-Arab women, like Ally, her beloved princess of an older sister, were preposterously beautiful, dark chocolate hair and enormous brown eyes popping off creamy skin, but Rita didn’t think she’d gotten that particular deal of the cards. She thought she was okay looking, not stunning but not unsightly, even if her eyes’ relation to her nose vaguely evoked a Picasso. And that had always suited her just fine, to the very minimal extent she’d ever cared about such things—far, far less than Ally, she was sure of that.

  She and Jonah walked, arm in arm, toward the tent, where a large circle of people, hand in hand, moved rightward in increments to the music, step-step-kick-and-stomp, the basic components of the dabke, which she’d been dancing at weddings since she was four years old.

  “You are getting on that dance floor with me, you know,” she said.

  Jonah was squinting toward the tent. “It looks like the hora,” he said.

  “It’s not that different. You cross your left leg in the front, though, not the back, before you kick. It’s easy. If the Irish side of my family can learn to do it, you can. Come on, you’re a Semite. It’s in your genes.”

  “This Semite needs a beer first.”

  Before they entered the tent, her nephew Charlie, six, and niece Leila,eight,bounded out of the crowd toward them, tackling her. “Auntie Rita, Auntie Rita!” they shouted.

  “Oh my God!” Rita laughed, kneeling down to hug them. “Hi, guys! It’s so good to see you!”

  Leila hopped on one foot before her. “Look, look, I got a tattoo on my face. Do you know what it is?”

  “It’s a monkey!”

  “It’s a chimpanzee! The girls at the table over there did it.”

  Rita kissed her niece. “It’s so cool, Lei-lei.”

  Charlie hopped up and down before her, too. “What’s mine? Can you tell?”

  “It’s an alligator.”

  He frowned. “It’s a crocodile!”

  “Ohhh, it’s a crocodile! How can you tell the difference?”

  Charlie’s frown deepened. “Auntie Rita,you should be able to tell!”

  “Yeah.” It was Jonah, who squeezed her shoulder from above. “Auntie Rita, you should really be able to tell.”

  “I know, I should,” said Rita, game. “Lei-lei and Charlie, this is my boyfriend, Jonah.”

  Charlie looked up at him. “Are you gonna dance dubbie?” he asked.

  Leila frowned at her younger brother. “It’s dub-kee. With a k.”

  Jonah shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll dance dubbie, too.”

  This cracked up Charlie, though Leila continued to frown skeptically.

  Ally stepped out of the tent, striding purposefully toward them in khaki capri pants and a French sailor’s top. She’d dialed up her smile, as ready to charm as when she was five and had campaigned, successfully, to be the snow queen in the school holiday pageant. Rita, who had not seen her in three months, rose and hugged her older sister and only sibling, feeling, as she had felt since they were little girls, that when she was with Ally nothing could go wrong, or that even if anything did, it didn’t matter much because Ally—crisp, capable, diplomatic, and kind—would fix it.

  “You guys are attacking Auntie Rita already and she’s not even in the tent!” Ally exclaimed, one hand still loosely holding her sister’s.

  “We’re not attacking her, we’re showing her our tattoos,” Charlie corrected.

  Ally leveled her eyes at Rita and Jonah. “They’re temporary tattoos, thank God.” She then regarded Rita keenly. “You look amazing.”

  You say “amazing” as though it’s some dramatic improvement from the last time you saw me, Rita wanted to tease. But instead she said, “Thank you! So do you! I love your hair.”

  Ally’s face darkened. “Do you really?” She’d had her long curls cropped into something short and even a bit playful and edgy. “You don’t think it makes me look too—” She faltered for the word.

  “Butch?” Rita offered.

  “Well, no, not butch. I don’t care about that. Just too . . . severe?”

  “You mean butch?” r />
  “No!”

  “You don’t look butch. It’s perfectly adorable. Very chic.”

  Ally—for whom looks had always been a central concern, even if both humility and feminism had forever admonished her for this— seemed to slacken with genuine relief. “Well, thank you. Gary said that I looked ready for the women’s softball team.”

  “No!” exclaimed Rita. Gary was her brother-in-law, a human resources executive for a biotech firm on Route 128, whom she found impenetrably dull at best and reliably offensive at worst. She felt the pang of inflamed sisterly loyalty she often felt toward Ally in relation to Gary’s jabs, which Ally strove to find funny. But then again, Rita always had to remind herself, Ally had made her choices. And so had she.

  Ally then hugged Jonah. “Well, hello again!” They’d met a month before in D. C., when Ally had come down alone for a work conference and stayed overnight with Rita. Later, Ally had texted Rita: He’s a keeper. Daddy will love him. And Rita had texted back: And mom? And Ally had texted back: Does mom love anyone? lol. And then Rita: Mom loved Seamus. That had been the family dog back in their elementary school years. Now Ally asked Jonah: “Are you ready for Middle Eastern exotica?”

  Jonah pointed to Rita. “What do you think I have right here?”

  Ally laughed. “You should’ve heard her growing up when she had a Massachusetts accent. Very exotic.”

  “Hmm,” said Jonah, turning to Rita. “I bet that was sexy.”

  Rita blushed. “We need to terminate this line of conversation right now.” She could joke about her childhood Boston accent, which was still unfortunately preserved on some old cassettes and VHS tapes that she knew her sister held on to, probably for blackmail purposes someday.

  Ally herded everyone toward the tent. “Come in, come in! Everyone wants to meet you, Jonah. They might let you eat and drink something before they pull you onto the dance floor.”

  They slipped inside. Rita tensed involuntarily. Suddenly, she was surrounded by Arabs—talking, laughing, eating, drinking, dancing, gambling, crowding together to take pictures, chasing children, gesticulating, throwing dollar bills at the belly dancer. She scanned a sea of dark hair, save the rare visiting non-Arab, somebody’s friend or relative by marriage, and of course save certain women who, in time-honored Lebanese style, insisted on living as brassy blondes.