How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu Page B

“Although I think he’s having a problem with funding.”
    Angela would later say that I had deliberately lied to her at that moment.
    “You said Bill was fine. You said you stayed late working with him. None of which was true.”
    But she would be wrong about the deliberate part. At the time I hadn’t given much thought to what I was saying. I had returned home and I had found Angela sitting at the table, buried in work but still worried about where I was, and I had thought it almost miraculous that such a thing should occur. Nothing in my life up to that point had quite prepared me for that, neither my parents nor the handful of lovers I had had before then. Everything else I said after that I said with the preservation of that image in mind.
    It took two days for Angela to learn that I had lost my job at the center. She always left for work just as I was waking up, and of course when she came home, I was supposed to be there waiting; our schedules had remained unchanged. We didn’t talk about my work during those two days, except to speculate once as to what might have happened to one of the clients we had worked with together.
    “Do you remember the Kurdish family that came in just before I left?”
    “What was their story?”
    “Turkish—the father was arrested five times for no real reason. You may have said it was close to a dozen.”
    “Seven. A dozen would have been too much. He was arrested seven times—beaten and tortured twice. He had to give bribes every week to keep from being arrested again. His family was going broke and hungry as a result.”
    “Was any of that true?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I doubt it. He was smart. He came in lying. I just helped him do it better. My guess is that right now he and his family are doing just fine.”
    The next day she tried to reach me on my cell. Had I wanted to keep the truth about my job hidden from her, I would have answered my phone when she called. Instead I let it ring for the entire afternoon without even looking at it while I sat on the bench Angela and I had claimed. There I tried to recall just what exactly I had said to her the night before, and how much damage I may have caused as a result. Similar slips with the truth had occurred before, but there was often very little at stake.
    At four p.m. she gave in and called the center directly. When Bill answered the phone, she asked him where I was.
    “He must have thought I was an idiot,” she said later that evening. “Does he know we live together?”
    “Yes. I told him as soon as I moved in.”
    “That’s worse,” she said. “Honestly, I’d rather be an idiot.”
    The fact that she had been embarrassed enraged her further; it made her victim to what she assumed would be other people’s pity. For the next fifteen minutes she puzzled over what had made me lie to her. “Are you trying to get out of this?” she asked. “If so you don’t have to lie. Just get up and leave.”
    And then later: “Do you want me to be angry at you?” “Are you angry at me?” “Do you want to get back at me for something?” “Did I embarrass you?” “Do you not trust me?” “What else have you lied about?”
    And for all of her questions I didn’t have a single response. Once found out, I had nothing to counter with in return. Angela yelled, and as her rage grew louder I found myself mentally backing out of the room, not all at once as I had previously done with Bill, but in slow, gradual stages so that it took some time before Angela noticed that all but the obligatory lights had gone out.
    “Please tell me you’re listening to me, Jonas,” she said. “You haven’t said anything.”
    “Of course I’m listening,” I told her. “That’s what I’ve been doing. I know you’re angry and you have every right to be.”
    I learned after that to never try to placate her with what she knew to be simple, generic words of comfort.
     
     
     
     
    As angry as Angela may have been that