Risk Tolerance #3
assertion; the sense of his beliefs rather than thoughts, convictions rather than theories.
“The world—our country—shouldn’t actively harm us,” she counters. “That’s not too much to ask.”
“If it takes away from my freedom, yes, it is.”
She shakes her head, at a loss. “I don’t get it, Aleksandr. What do you want, power or freedom?”
“They’re one and the same.”
It’s hard, but she pushes back on the knee-jerk instinct to argue; wanting instead to understand this; to understand him.
“How do you reconcile that?” she asks.
“The power to define your own life, live as you see fit, on the basis of your own abilities? That’s freedom. No one can make
my choices for me. I know what it’s like to have nothing, no control. I’ve fought for this—that power—and no one will take
that away from me.”
“Is that your biggest fear then? Being powerless?”
“Yes,” Aleksandr says, simply. “Poverty—powerlessness—terrifies me. The idea that I can’t control what’s happening, can’t
take care of myself and mine. It’s—that’s hell. The insecurity, the lack of safety. I lived in that for too long.”
Moments like this, when he’s honest—vulnerable even—but calm: They make Lili feel like the exposed one, along with her own
small, disconcerting sense of agreement with his confessed fear. “So, shouldn’t we help one another, as a society?” she pushes.
“Keep each other safe from that insecurity, that hell?”
Aleksandr sighs. “I want to believe that. I do. But I’ve never seen it happen. I’ve only ever seen people protect what’s theirs,
betray each other for gain. It’s neither good nor evil, it just is.”
“Isn’t that—well, isn’t that rather ruthless?” she says, wrinkling her nose with distaste.
“Is that so bad?”
“Yes!” Lili exclaims, throwing her hands up. “Of course, it’s bad—Jesus, do you even hear yourself? Fuck, like some Machiavelli
fanboy—stop smiling, Aleksandr! What, do you find it entertaining, arguing with me?”
“I find it enjoyable, speaking with you,” he corrects. “I find you extremely thoughtful.”
Lili’s cheeks go hot, and sudden warmth blooms in her chest—even though they’re arguing, somehow especially when they’re arguing—inconvenient
and intense, but their next course arrives then: seared eggplant, pine buds, pistachios, honey.
“You know, if you ever get tired of fine dining, there’s a great Lebanese place down the block,” she tells Aleksandr. “But
I don’t think I could convince you to eat with your hands.”
He grins. “Next time. I do love that place, too.”
“Oh. Have you—have you had much Middle Eastern food?”
“I’ve spent time in the region for work.”
“Beyond the Gulf?” she counters.
He raises a brow. “Yes—I have lived outside of America for most of my life, you know.”
“Right,” she says. “Asia, too, when you started at BlackRiver. Private equity.”
“Careful, or I might interpret your knowledge as interest.”
Lili rolls her eyes, scooping up a honey-laden bite. “Have you been to Lebanon before?”
“Yes,” he says. “Yourself?”
It would be easy enough to wave at an answer, move on. To find comfort in the familiar fear, retreat at the prospect of letting
someone in, scared of the damage they could find.
Instead, Lili clears her throat. “My, um, my mother was from there. Beirut. I mean, ethnically Armenian and Lebanese. Came
to California for school.”
“Stanford?”
“For her undergrad, yeah. She was doing her PhD at Berkeley.”
Glancing up, Lili finds Aleksandr watching her. Curious, intent, but not—not demanding. Like he’s waiting for her to tell him what she wants to share.
She hesitates; then takes a breath and trusts—herself, she thinks. “I never visited,” Lili says quietly. “Lebanon, I mean.
I was young when they died. My parents.”
“Was your father from Lebanon, too?”
She shakes her head, grasping for her wine again: uncomfortable, this feels uncomfortable, telling him. But not unsafe. “No,
American. Why?”
“Your last name.”
Lili snorts. “How patriarchal. No, my last name is my mother’s. Her parents died in the war, she didn’t have any surviving
siblings. Only a bit of extended family. She wanted her family’s name to go on, you know? It was actually my dad’s idea.”
“How did they meet?”
“At school. Undergrad.” Lili smiles, soft with the borrowed memory. “My mom made him read Said before she agreed to go out
with him. He came back with it annotated.”
Aleksandr laughs, shaking his head. “I’ve already read Said.”
Her stomach twists; she takes a deeper drink of wine.
“You mentioned you grew up in San Francisco?” he asks.
“Yeah, then Marin. My foster family lives in Mill Valley.”
“Then New York for school?”
Lili nods. “How about you?” she asks. She is approaching the limits of what she wants to share. “Why New York? You’re barely
here, it seems.”
“Headquarters are here.”
“Right, but you could easily live in London. Closer to Europe, and you have offices everywhere.”
Aleksandr shrugs. “I suppose I love this country, somewhat. It respects hunger. It let me take what I could never reach for,
back home.”
“This country engenders the hunger—spiritual, emotional, physical—of millions of people.”
“I have no illusions about the brutality of America. But there’s room to dream here.”
“More like room to fall.”
“Yes, but the inverse of that is having so much further to climb. Even the potential of that—it’s a privilege.”
“You’re fetishizing the American dream.”
“There’s a reason the idea persists,” he says. “There’s a reason we keep washing up on this shore.”
“Your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” Lili recites.
Aleksandr huffs—not quite a laugh but something similar. “That poem makes Michael cry. He drags me out to Liberty Island at
least once every year.”
“Huh. He doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”
“I don’t think it is sentimental, actually. Sometimes, I wonder if only immigrants can really love America.”
“In what sense?”
“If this is all you’ve ever known, if your family roots stretch back generations here, you can’t see it for what it is,” Aleksandr
says, looking over the bustling dining room; a city and its wealth. “That sense of liberty, I suppose. You can’t appreciate
it without having experienced its absence.”
Again, the shadow of the personal and the past in his words. Her curiosity about his past is uncomfortable—what it means,
what it says about what’s becoming important to her. She ignores the concern. “Could you—could you tell me more about it?”
she asks. “Russia?”
“What would you like to know?” She hears stiffness in his voice: not put off, not defensive, but rather, the sense of an instinct
to hide melting under the decision to reveal.
“When did you leave?”
“’93. A few months before the coup.”
“How? Or—I mean, I guess, why?”
“School.”
“And your mother stayed behind?”
Aleksandr laughs, once. “Oh, yes, she stayed.”
“Why?”
“I think she called me a defector for a good decade afterwards,” he says.
Lili frowns. “Was she supportive of the state, when you were growing up?”
“No, not at all. She was a fairly vocal critic, but when you’ve spent your entire life living in reaction to something, you
can’t just leave it. Or so she claims. Her priorities were always clear.”
Lili watches him, as he watches the restaurant; he’s not meeting her gaze. “Did you ever think about moving back?” she asks.
He shakes his head. “No. After school, I considered France, I suppose.”
She tilts her head. “Why France?”
“My French was good enough. My mother taught French literature, and I went to school in Paris for a while on exchange during
undergrad.”
“Wow.” Lili gives a soft laugh. “Paris in your twenties.”
Aleksandr laughs, too, but it’s a hard twist of a sound. It makes her chest ache a little.
“I was miserable,” he says.
“What? What do you mean?”
He sighs. “Every day, something new from home. News, more misery. It felt like everything was crumbling, all the hopes for
anything resembling actual freedom or change—anything beyond hunger, death, corruption—but I never had the full picture. Around
me, nothing had changed. People laughed, lived life, and I—I didn’t feel like I was even part of the same species. Probably
the loneliest I’ve ever been in my entire life.”
Lili says nothing. She holds her breath as his eyes roam the room, its oblivious chatter. His hair is still messy from earlier,
from her own hands, and the loose collar of his shirt feels intimate to her.
She wants him to keep speaking; she wants to keep listening.
He twists his wineglass between his fingers. “When I’d wait for the Métro, it wasn’t that I wanted to jump, but there was
some—understanding, I suppose. Of why people do that. Not the intention to do anything, but—”
“No, I get that,” Lili murmurs.
He looks at her, then. Some caution, eyes searching.
Lili holds his gaze. “Tell me more about it,” she says. “Paris.”
“Have you been?”
“No, why?”
“Your mother. She spoke French, did she not? Being Lebanese.”
“Oh. Yeah, she did. But she’d never been to France, either.” She shrugs, pushing aside a complicated, dark pain that arises:
all the things her parents never did. “Go on,” she prompts. “Tell me about Paris, I’m curious.”
“I spent a lot of time in churches,” he says, a rueful smile.
“I thought you weren’t religious.”
“I’m not. And I wasn’t then, either, but I’d never experienced churches before, not really.
The closest I’d come had been state monuments.
So, I’d sit in these old cathedrals. Empty, weekday mornings before class.
Staring up at those soaring stone arches, trying to feel something in the scale of it—something grander, more mysterious, more powerful, that wasn’t state or politics.
” He shrugs. “So, churches. Wandering a lot. The Luxembourg Gardens were close to school, I’d read there most days.
There were these used books, livres de poche, from Gibert Joseph that you could buy cheap. ”
Lili doesn’t want to breathe for fear she’ll shift the moment.
She’s never really seen him speak like this before: thoughts and memories cohering into words a moment before he says them.