The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [94]
Samira smiled. “They came to Montreal in the thirties—when the country was still called Persia.”
Noel nodded. “And Egyptian Jews. Did you know that The Arabian Nights draws extensively on Jewish sources?”
“No, I’m not really up on … either.”
“In ‘The Sultan and His Three Sons,’ for example, and ‘The Angel of Death,’ and ‘Alexander and the Pious Man’ and …” He stopped when he saw tears forming in Samira’s eyes—from a protracted yawn. I’m literally boring her to tears, he thought. “Would you like some more of this?” He held up the bottle. “Will we get to seventeen, do you think?”
“I think I’ve reached my limit. But go ahead.”
“No, I’ve reached mine too.” He replaced the glass stopper in the bottle. “So you … grew up here. You went to university in Montreal?”
“No, the States.”
“Where?”
“Cornell.”
“Really? That’s where Nabokov taught. While writing his autobiography.”39
“And Lolita.”
“We used to live down there—in New York State, I mean. Long Island. I was there until the second grade. I’d love to go back one day …” Letters and numbers began percolating inside Noel’s skull: the chiselled Baskerville capitals of BABYLON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, the pebbled black plastic 22 on his classroom door, the sinistral chalk letters of Miss Schonborn … Noel rubbed his eyes, refocused. “Ever been there?”
“Long Island? Once. I went to see an Islanders game.”
Cards began to fly from the pack, bouncing off Noel’s inner walls: dog-eared cards of Mike Bossy and Denis Potvin, Bryan Trottier and Bobby Nystrom, Clark Gillies and Butch Goring … Their stats, as in a centrifuge, began to spin and scatter. He pressed his thumb and forefinger against his eyeballs, hard. “So … what’d you study? At Cornell.”
“Well, my father had this master plan. He thought I should study marketing, so I could help expand the family business. He owned a restaurant in Lachine.”
“Which one?”
“Le Tapis Magique.”
“You’re kidding! That restaurant by the water, near Saul Bellow’s old neighbourhood? That’s an institution.”
“Maybe I served you.”
“No, I’ve never been there.” Noel ran his fingers up and down the skull-and-crossbones label on the bottle. “So you got your MBA?”
Samira shook her head. “I was totally not interested in business, so after a semester of boredom—of pain—I switched over to the arts. Without telling my father, who hated … impractical things.”
“What’d you take?”
“Impractical things. English lit, astronomy, psychology, art history. Oh, and theatre arts.”
“Which is how you got the film part?”
“Not really, no. My roommate happened to see a poster on campus, some film production company looking for an ‘Arabic-American teenager.’”
“So you went for an audition.”
“To this day, I have no idea why. It’s not something I ever wanted to do, at least not professionally. I guess I went because I had almost no money, and was tired of taking orders from the assistant manager of Wendy’s. Next thing I knew I was flying to Venice.”
“Where you met Stirling Trevanne.”
“Yeah. Whose real name is Lionel Lifschitz. An asshole, as it turned out, like all my boyfriends, but breathtakingly handsome—as his teenage fans kept reminding me. Daily. Anyway, after the shooting I moved out of my apartment, took a bus to New York and the red-eye to LA.” The vertical city to the horizontal one, she recalled thinking, a tremor of excitement running through her as she gazed on each from the sky.
“To live with him,” said Noel.
Samira sighed. “Yeah. Then the film comes out—and the shit hits the fan. The film’s a mega-hit, critically at least, wins awards in Venice and Berlin, Stirling loses his mind, my father has a massive coronary.”
“Are you serious? Your father had a heart attack?”
“While watching the film.”
“My God. And he … Is he better now?”
“No, he died. I went back for the funeral, and my mother guilted me out the whole time, saying that I’d killed him, that the nude scene in the movie killed him. She’d walk around the house holding his shirts to her breast, weeping for hours. Especially when I was there to see it. Must be her Jewish