Due Diligence #4
“A patron commissioned it to memorialize her late husband,” she says. “When Bocklin completed it, he told her, ‘You will be
able to dream yourself into the world of dark shadows.’ There’s something incredibly morbid about that—dreaming yourself into
death, essentially—but also really beautiful? Liberating, almost. I mean, liberating in the sense of reframing death as dreamlike,
not a horror waiting. Something you already reach through sleep.”
She glances over the oil paints, the dim gleam of shades: These details she knows well.
“The structures in the cliffs, those could be tombs, but that’s just inference.
We have no idea. And the dark cypress trees you almost can’t pick out—something’s there.
There’s this tension, this magnetism. Then, aside from the darkness, there’s something to the light on the cliffs, the figures—as if behind them, behind us, out of view, there’s fire, some destruction.
It’s a bit—violent? It makes that copse of the cypress trees, the complete darkness of it almost soothing.
Like relief. You can just stare and stare. ”
“When’s the first time you saw it?” he asks.
“When I started undergrad.”
“You’re not from New York, are you?”
Lili immediately stiffens. A familiar old response, coming on guard. “Why do you say that?”
“Most people aren’t from here,” he says. Simple, unweighted. He’s still contemplating the painting, unaware of her reaction.
The tension in her shoulders eases a bit. “California,” she says, after a beat. “San Francisco.”
Their tiny apartment in North Beach, where she’d wake up to the sound of cable cars and parrots flying down from Telegraph
Hill. Bay windows, glimpses of the water and white sails of the Marina, racing up to the top of Russian Hill with her dad
after kindergarten. Free admission at SFMOMA, blurs of color and shapes. What do you think? her mom would ask, and Lili had tilted her head, tried to put emotions into words, and her mom had nodded and listened, helping
her try to read the curator note. Crispy falafel afterwards, the crinkle of napkins, fingers and lips smeared with oil, her
mother grinning and wiping tahini from Lili’s face as they’d walked the streets of Chinatown, the Embarcadero at sunset, the
Bay Bridge lit up at night.
Friday nights with fresh bucatini and arrabbiata sauce, her mother’s labs settled for the weekend, spice that made her dad’s
eyes stream—Jesus, I thought this was Italian food—making her mom laugh: Her mother’s laugh, it’s one of those sounds, like the specific roar of the Pacific and the chatter
of the parrot flock, that she still hears sometimes, unbidden and dislocated.
Wiping away tears of laughter, they’d tell Lili about their trip to the Middle East after undergrad.
These secondhand memories, faded photographs tucked away in her closet that she’s pored over so many times, with such longing—trying so hard to hold onto her parents, grasp at people who are no longer there, who will never be able to answer any of her questions or share any more of their stories—until they’ve become more vivid than her own memories: in Istanbul, the call of the muezzin in the purple dusk, strong black tea beside the waters of the Bosphorus; the lush green hills and throaty red wines of Georgia, trains through the Caucasus, crates of apricots glowing with fragrant warmth; the roar of traffic-choked Cairene streets, with the respite of hidden courtyards, cool with running fountains, in the homes of distant relatives; peeling paint on walls and politicians’ posters, miniskirts and veils, overgrown orchards of Damascus, buying tea leaves and za’atar—It’s spicier, Syrian za’atar, her mother would explain, telling her these stories—at the souk, marble floors of the mosque, the crane of their necks inside
the Umayyad to see the inside of the dome high above, the blur of blue mosaic; and finally, Lebanon—Beirut, her mother’s city
by the sea.
The jacaranda was blooming in the heavy night air when they arrived, their backpacks laden with luggage tags, the city lights
glittering along the coast. Old men sat in the street smoking, undisturbed by the shouts of joy as her mother ran into the
arms of her godmother.
Beirut: where the soft, precise melodies of French mixed with the intense richness of Arabic. Both languages of the throat.
Evenings ran late with slim cups of arak around the kitchen table as relatives and neighbors stopped by, open windows letting
in the sea breeze. Waking up early, her mother had dragged her father to Armenian bakeries: wood-fired, paper-thin crunch of flour-dusted flatbread.
In the morning chatter of crowded cafés, her mother’s bright grin came so much easier, finally back home; how her shoulders
had relaxed. It was a city scarred by civil war, but it was still hers.
Hamra, Achrafieh, Mar Mikhael: neighborhoods of her mother’s childhood and youth.
She’d led them through alleys, packed markets; bowers hung heavy with oleander, strings of clotheslines overhead, the sounds of cooking as grandmothers called kids in for dinner, beat-up Mercedes parked against vivid orange walls, bullet holes and graffiti scarring colonial villas, while pensioners played backgammon in the street.
In the homes of her friends and family across the city, meals of welcome awaited them.
The gloss and clatter of thin plates, as tables were set, with soft swipes of pita into hummus doused with nearly green olive oil.
Radio mingled with the television, interrupted by the uproar of laughter, as her mother’s cousins corrected her father’s college Arabic mistakes, the American in their midst.
After dinner, her father happily took toothpicks to go, much to her mother’s chagrin, as they walked home along the Corniche
at night. Cigarette smoke mingled with the clack of rosaries, the crash of waves against pebbled beaches. Long golden evenings
lingered on the balconies of her mother’s friends, little glasses of cheap red wine, watching the narrow streets full of nightclubs
and restaurants. Motorcycles sped by bombed-out buildings, falafel shops glowed, and children played in the sea. All these
memories Lili has tried to make her own, to feel—to deserve—some connection to her parents, the idea of heritage that belongs
to her.
It was the first time her mother had returned since leaving during the civil war, she’d quietly told Lili, as they’d flicked
through photographs together. Her family was much smaller, and thinner now. Her parents, her brother—your grandparents, your uncle—had died in the war; many relatives also died in the crossfire, a few emigrated if lucky. A place she’s never seen, an attenuated,
fragmented family she doesn’t know. Her mother’s last name, with its histories now inaccessible to her: a thing they gave
her.
That summer she turned six, the three of them drove down to Carmel-by-the-Sea and Monterey. It was ocean for miles, and her
dad had swung her up onto his shoulders, and her mother had laughed like joy was light. Rushing air, the clean crash of waves.
They’d had fresh fish stew at a restaurant, and her parents had split a bottle of wine, and Lili had swung her legs under
the table, remembering the feeling of that smile in her chest—the way her dad watched her mom as she explained the latest
progress with her dissertation, how animatedly her mom had waved her hands about to demonstrate concepts of physics, space,
time, and how her dad had laughed, catching her glass before she’d accidentally flung it out into the aisle. Her blush, and
the kiss he’d planted on her cheek, and Lili had felt her heart soar a little—
Pain is often simple but unfair.
They’d been driving back over the bridge from the East Bay. It was a weekend. Her mom had needed to check on labs running at the university, and her dad had driven her instead of taking BART.
They left Lili with their neighbor, a young art student who’d just graduated Berkeley. Lili had been painting with her—sitting
in a patch of sunshine on her hardwood floors, giggling, dried colorful paint on the palms of her hands—
The group home afterwards was cold, sanitized. Fluorescent lighting, carefully measured doses of supplements. Maintained,
but not taken care of. Existence, but not presence. Vitamin D, not sunshine. A gray, drab safety net with too-big holes in
it. Matter-of-fact and numb.
She wasn’t there for long after the car crash. A few weeks for the state to run routine checks—parents had no will? No real
family in the country? Friends of the family? International placement wasn’t an option, Israel had just invaded Lebanon, her
mother’s few remaining relatives now living in a freshly enflamed war zone—before her state guardian informed her that she
was being placed with a foster family. Lucky, really lucky: She was so young, and her parents had been intelligent, bright
young folks, such a shame, mother a PhD student, father in tech—
Mill Valley, then. Redwoods, heavy questions, rich kids. Trees everywhere, sequoia and madrone that crowded out the sky. Mountain
bikes, the skid of tires and dirt, huge houses slipping out of view in the forest. Too-expensive cars in the school parking
lot. The laughter of her childhood there wasn’t kind—teenagers, the clink of bottles, house parties, absent parents. High
school friendships, the loose, shifting cat’s cradle of adolescent alliances. She felt lonely in a way that ached deep inside
her, like an internal tattoo. The dark sand of Tennessee Cove, hikes by herself, was her escape; sneaking out of the house
as soon as she was a teenager for just a slice of freedom and nothing.