The Last Illusion Page 21

  That left Zal.

  In July, in spite of Zal’s better judgment, in spite of Asiya trying her hardest to respect him and stay away, they had found each other in bed again, in each other’s arms and kisses and tears also. The first thing Zal had thought when he bumped into her on the street—just like they had met, nowhere really, but sans dead bird this time—was that this was it, this was not going to be a happy ending.

  But the man in him gave in to her completely, went home with her, got in bed with her, and it was all over, all over again.

  “Father, I’m moving back downtown, to my apartment,” he announced later that month.

  Hendricks, blindsided, did not feel ready for this. He sensed trouble. “But, Zal—”

  “But nothing, Father. I’m fine. Everything is fine. Better than ever. And thank you.”

  They argued and he moved.

  And time tried to turn back its clock to where Zal and Asiya had left off.

  This was the love of the old movies, Zal told himself, that came back and back and back even when people didn’t want it too. He tried to see the best in it, tried to find ways to live with it. As for Asiya, he learned some things about her, small things. For instance, when she got that worried look in her eyes, all he had to do was run a finger over her face or, even more effective, place his lips over hers, and she’d remember to stop.

  Zal lived about as downtown as Asiya lived uptown, in the neighborhood in lower Manhattan that his father used to live in back when it was undesirable. His apartment, too, was his father’s first apartment after Columbia, a studio in a formerly run-down warehouse district by the water, the end of the entire island, a place nobody but those who had to hung out. By Zal’s time, everything had turned upside down and it was suddenly a neighborhood of boutiques, galleries, bistros, champagne bars, vegan doughnut shops, and couples of the most glamorous ilk, who were, if not directly related, then distant cousins of the financial world just blocks away. It was where a sort of invincible young and rich lived, the type whose livelihood it was always impossible to imagine, the ones who made you feel like you were in the cinema version of Manhattan life. Zal, of course, did not quite fit in. But sometimes, now that Asiya was over on his end of the island more and more, he wondered if he could have a chance at it. He imagined Asiya pregnant and in an elegant trench coat, her hair in long loose curls and a red painted smile on her lips that nothing could wipe away, and himself in a suit and umbrella and fedora; he imagined their loft, purposefully bare except maybe for Asiya’s art and evidence of whatever the hell he was to do.

  With Asiya back in his life, he was off the job track. It was as if a girlfriend was a full-time job—he just forgot all about working. Once again, he lost himself in her, and it felt good almost. It was delaying the inevitable, a crisis Zal was sure was going to come his way the more normal he got.

  Who was he, and what was he going to do with himself ?

  It was a most human question, after all.

  He put it off. So had she: Asiya was in an interesting period, a quiet one, a stable one, he thought. She had stopped her work altogether, never visiting her studio to work on prints, never even taking her camera out, never commenting on perfect shots like she used to. There was no talk of birds, living or dead.

  Out of concern, and out of reward, for her sudden normalcy—and in homage to that future vision of their movie star selves—Zal decided to do something special for her birthday that summer. On a map of New York in his apartment, Asiya had made red pencil markings on various streets and subway stops and landmarks, but the one she had drawn several circle scrawls around, with a couple of asterisks to boot, was a landmark not far from him: the World Trade Center.

  Maybe she wanted to go there. Zal, after all, had never been there.

  He asked his father if there was a place to go there for a birthday.

  “Well, there’s a restaurant and of course the bar on top, Windows on the World or whatever it’s called,” Hendricks said. “It’s pricey, Zal, and I think you need a reservation for a proper booth. So whose birthday?” He was dreading the answer, having a feeling that he already knew.

  “You don’t know her,” Zal said, ready for it. “It’s a new friend.”

  “A new . . . woman?”

  “Yes, a new woman,” Zal echoed. “You’ve been there?”

  “Only once,” he said. “I went alone after Nilou died. She had always wanted to go there and we never got a chance, so I went there when I started going to all the places she’d always wanted to go with me.”

  “You liked it?”

  “It was okay,” Hendricks said. “Not really my thing, those high-rise tower bars. But you’d love it. You love that stuff.”

  Heights, Zal thought. It was true: he had a love of heights. “I’ll take her there then,” Zal said and got off the phone.

  It was the first time he was doing something for Asiya, and it felt good. When he made a reservation for “Hendricks,” it also felt good. He was “Hendricks,” a Hendricks that was not his father, but himself, getting there at least. He could even be “Hendricks Party of Two.”

  The one thing Asiya did not expect on her birthday was to get surprised by Zal. She thought it would go more or less like the last birthday that she couldn’t even remember but that was spent with him, an ordinary summer day, maybe a walk on a pier, maybe some ice cream, maybe even a nice dinner out. But this was clearly different: Zal had woken up that morning antsy, all nerves, finally caving in to her questioning:

  “Fine, yes, there’s a surprise,” he said. “Do you really want to ruin it?”

  She smiled softly. “I just hate surprises, that’s all. I mean, historically, surprises, given my anxiety disorder, were never very easy on me, but this is going to be different. I can feel it in my bones.” She closed her eyes and kept smiling, as if that, too, was a psychic premonition, but for once of the best kind.

  All he told her was to dress up. She was about to complain and insist that she never dressed up, but then she saw the joy in his eyes when he got to tell his woman to dress up, and so she quickly consented. She went home—she had been spending less and less time there, just checking in on Willa and Willa alone, with Zachary still almost completely moved out—and picked out the only dress she had, a high school graduation dress her mother had bought for her, which she only wore that one time. It was a navy silk strapless number and it had been too sexy back then, though she had still worn it, out of a sense of duty. It still fit her perfectly, and she even took the tiniest bit of joy in its sexiness. Zal, this new Zal, this finally-boyfriend, would love it, she thought.

  When she returned to his place, lightly made-up, teetering in old high heels, and wearing that dress, she saw that Zal was also dressed up and apparently had been for a while. He was sitting on a chair, just waiting for her, in the suit his father had gotten him for his Vegas trip, the only suit he had, which Asiya had never seen. He looked handsome, though more serious than ever, professorial almost, in that austere charcoal.

  “Look at us!” Asiya exclaimed.

  “We’re something,” Zal shot back, and held a glass out to her.

  Pink champagne. It was the first time since Willa’s party either of them had had pink champagne. Asiya saw that he had poured it in a juice cup—either he didn’t own champagne flutes or he just didn’t know—but she took it gratefully, and they clinked glasses and drank. She started to think this was the only surprise—which would have been good enough, she thought, considering—when Zal looked to his watch and gasped.

  “Oh no! I’ve been so good about it and now we’re almost late!”

  “Late? To what?” Asiya smiled.

  Zal was already up and scrambling for keys, wallet, phone. “To the surprise!”

  She couldn’t help but ask: “Dinner, right?”

  “Asiya, you’re ruining it! Yes, dinner, fine! But you don’t know where the surprise is!”

  “Our café?” she guessed.

  He gave
her a look. “Dressed up like this?”

  She laughed. “Okay, okay, I’ll just stop.”

  He kissed her quickly on the head, grabbed her wrist, and led her out. There wasn’t much time left.

  They caught a cab, and Zal handed the address to the driver on a card. “The destination is a surprise for the lady, so I don’t want to say it.” The cabdriver smiled, amused.

  In the cab, he was breathing hard. It was his first real, expensive dinner for a woman, and reservations had been so difficult to get—he’d practically had to beg—and now they were almost late. He tried to meet her eye once in a while, but he met the face of his watch even more.

  “We’re really close, but we’re running out of time,” he said, staring out into the twilight-struck lower Manhattan.

  She didn’t say a word—just looked down at her palms, nodding slowly, trying to just focus on the present, trying to go back to the very joy of wondering what in the world was in store for them, just that night and that night alone.

  When they were a block away, Zal ordered her to close her eyes. She did so with a big smile, her heart pounding with anticipation. She had no idea, no idea at all, she swore to him. “Right here is fine,” Zal said to the cabdriver, and he paid and got up and opened the door for Asiya, who was still blind.

  “I have to open my eyes now, Zal!” she cried.

  There in the dark blue of it all, he took her face and kissed each lid, just as he’d rehearsed, and, as if on cue, she opened her eyes. For a moment she didn’t recognize it, a patch of Manhattan she didn’t frequent, even though it was just a few blocks from his apartment—too close for a cab ride, though she assumed he did it so he could surprise her. She was indeed surprised, shocked even. She looked at them all the way up, the evening breeze whipping between their impossible height, all the way down to them.

  “The World Trade,” she whispered, her smile suddenly gone.

  “Yup! Dinner reservations up at the top!” Zal announced proudly.

  “The World Trade,” she uttered again, as if in disbelief. “Zal, why . . . ? Why?”

  “I saw that you’d marked it on the map,” he said, his pride making him blind to her sudden unmistakable uneasiness. “And I heard it was a really nice dinner-and-drinks spot, really special, and you know how much I love being high up, and I thought . . . I don’t know. I just thought it would be something nice to do.”

  He searched her eyes, which were squinting up at the towers, suspiciously.

  “Oh, Zal, thanks,” she tried to gush, but it was easy to read the trouble in her voice.

  “What, you’re disappointed? I built it up too much, didn’t I? Or did you guess?”

  She shook her head and swallowed hard. “No, that’s not it. It’s just, I’ve never been there. Never really imagined it, especially tonight.”

  “But you marked it—didn’t you? What did the mark mean?”

  She looked at him, imploringly. You don’t want to know the answer to that, Zal, her eyes said, not tonight of all nights. She was determined not to ruin anything.

  Perhaps he got the message—in any case, he gave his watch one more look and finally said, “Look, we’re officially late. We’ve got to go. I don’t want to blow this. I really want to do this for you—just enjoy it, okay?”

  Again she let her wrist be taken and her feet nudged along. By the time they got to the great big lobby with its hallway full of elevators, she told herself it would be fine. They were cutting it close, but whatever was coming wasn’t going to get them for a little while anyway, that much she knew.

  The elevators opened on the top of the building, the 106th floor, and Asiya felt the ground beneath her give a little. She stumbled, and Zal caught her just in time.

  “Whoa, not used to heels, are you?” he said, trying to make a joke as he held on to her shoulders. “You okay?”

  She looked very pale. She nodded anemically as she peered over the hostess booth to the room beyond it.

  “Windows on the World,” Zal declared. “Great name, right? It sounds like we’re at the top of the world, and we kind of are!”

  She nodded again, wiping her forehead. She was sweating, a cold sweat. “Is it harder to breathe up here? Air thinner or something?” She was using her hands to fan herself, as if egging on the air to rush into her system.

  Zal motioned to the hostess, who was busy with two other couples in front of them. “It’s going to be fine, Asiya. Come on, it’s your birthday and this is a nice place. Just enjoy it. Everyone can breathe here, see? It’s all okay.”

  She nodded. She tried to shake the anxious thoughts away and focused instead on Zal, his pride, his glowing handsomeness, him in his suit and her in her dress—how far they had come. “I’m so sorry, Zal. Just some vertigo. I’m fine. This is all so lovely.”

  He gave her that look she knew would have been a smile if he had been able.

  The hostess, a pretty girl in fashionable red-framed glasses, smiled and winked, not minding “Mr. Hendricks’s” lateness, which Zal profusely apologized for, and she led them through the large bar and dining area to a small intimate table by the window.

  It was actually hard to avoid a window, as the place, true to its name, was surrounded. It was a massive space, with a multi-tiered, winding bar area, red-lit and packed with groups of men in expensive suits and smaller groups of younger women in short dresses, everyone drinking a martini or cosmopolitan or something that required a long stem and an olive or a cherry, Zal noted. Along the windows there was the dining area, darker, quieter, more intimate, but still prime for people-watching. It was a place to see and be seen, Zal thought, a place that was all about spectacle, a place he’d normally never care for. He thought neither would Asiya, but this was a special occasion, and so certainly they could both appreciate the otherworldliness of their experience. When else would they get to do this?

  Zal focused on what interested him more than people-watching: what was outside the window. On eye level there was just the sky, a perfect black sky. It was hard to imagine they were rooted in the ground, he felt so suspended. And then just below, all the lights: light upon light upon light, networks of Christmas-light-like tangled incandescence netted New York and Brooklyn and some of New Jersey and who knew what more. He felt like he could indeed see the whole world, that it was actually a window on the world. He felt like he was perched on a narrow branch and that with just the slightest inclination he could be up and away, into the dark everlasting heavens above New York.

  He snapped out of his fantasy in time to remember why they were there, and he immediately apologized for the long silence. Just barely prying himself from the view, he moved that they order drinks while they decided on what they wanted to order. “How’s that sound?” he asked the empty chair in front of him.

  Asiya was gone.

  Zal panicked, dashing around the entire circumference of Windows on the World, scanning everyone several times, tapping several wrong women with bare shoulders (he wasn’t used to seeing Asiya dressed up, so he’d already forgotten what the dress was like, except that it was strapless), and finally getting to a waitress who got to a manager to whom he reported his missing girlfriend—“she just vanished in thin air,” the manager repeated and pretended to write down verbatim, nodding calmly all the while. The manager, who was not happy Zal was creating such a scene and was not even entirely convinced there was a girlfriend until the hostess backed him up, assured Zal he was alerting WTC security. Zal blamed himself over and over for ignoring Asiya’s ill health, for ignoring her rushes of discomfort, for ignoring that maybe they weren’t ready to be that star-and-starlet couple of the movies who could do nights like this, until finally a female employee of the restaurant came dashing to him with a big smile and news: “Your girlfriend is okay!”

  “She is?!”

  “Well, not really, actually. The good news is she’s here; the bad news is she’s been in the bathroom the whole time and she’s a bit shaken up. She appears to have fainte
d and is now having a bit of a panic attack—”

  Zal groaned. “I’m going in there—”

  “Oh, no, sir, she’s gonna be out in a minute. She’s okay. One of our hostesses found her and she’s calming her down. She’ll be right out—”

  “I’m her boyfriend, I’ve got to be with her,” Zal protested, pushing past her.

  “Sir, men can’t go in there! There are other women in there who wouldn’t like that, sir!” the woman insisted, more firmly this time.

  Zal gave up sullenly. “I’ll go back and sit. Will you get her out to me immediately? I’m really worried.”

  But back at his seat, he questioned just how worried he was. A panic attack. Here it was again. How had she left like that, without a word, managed to pass out, and gotten herself worked up to the brink of panic again? He reminded himself it was her birthday, so whatever happened, he could not get mad at her.

  Soon enough, a large woman in a dark suit was walking Asiya to him. She looked like a little girl in comparison, still so pale, eyes wider than ever, nodding numbly at something the lady was saying as she motioned to Zal and their table.

  “Does this young lady belong to you?” the woman said with a big smile, as if awarding them both something spectacular.

  Zal nodded. “Asiya, my goodness, what happened—”

  Asiya tried to perk up as she sat down. “I’m so sorry. I was feeling a bit funny, and then I guess I fainted, and then I had a bit of an episode. This lady was so nice.”