Feast Days. Ian Mackenzie
her husband had lived in Naples, Washington, Switzerland. In letters she complained of the cocktail parties. I pulled down one of her books and flipped at random to an interior page. “É como se eu tivesse uma moeda e não soubesse em que país ela vale.” Money is confusing, in other words. Then I went back to the beginning and in my mind’s English read the first sentences: “– – – – – – am searching, I’m searching. I’m trying to understand.”
I knew other Americans in São Paulo. My husband had some American co-workers, and he knew Americans working at the other banks. Americans sometimes turned up. I overheard English at the cafés on Rua Oscar Freire.
There was a little collective, which privately I referred to as the Wives. We formed a circle because of the language we spoke, the roles we inhabited. We gathered together over time as if by some natural process; every other week I met someone new, and someone else stopped coming. I was once the new person. There were lunches, afternoon drinks; we ordered bottles, sauvignon blanc. I knew diplomats’ wives, the wives of company lawyers. The Mormon wives didn’t drink, but they laughed and gossiped as much as the drinking wives. The women who had children had nannies as well.
I met the Wives at a restaurant that was all windows, no walls; it was a shrine of glass and status anxiety. The point of all that glass was to look. The lunchgoers looked at one another, the passersby on the street looked in at the lunchgoers, and the lunchgoers occasionally looked out to see who was looking in. All that looking was highly contagious. You looked at strangers with more interest than you looked at your companions. It was a palace, a temple of looking.
The Wives had lived in London, Miami, Budapest, Nairobi, Hyderabad, Kuala Lumpur, they had lived all over, moving always because of their husbands’ jobs. They spoke about the boredom of interesting places. We were all of us ancillary. Expatriates had a way of talking selectively about the past. It was a perk of the lifestyle; no one asked for the full story. They talked about the way things were done in other countries, how the roads were, the horror of traffic, what you could buy in the grocery stores.
Karen said that when she learned she and her husband were moving to Brazil, she cried for three days. “But now I love it here. My husband found this bar in Pinheiros, we go and listen to music. You would love it. Brazilian music.” Rachel said, “My greatest fear isn’t growing old. It’s going blind. They’ve done the laser eye surgery twice already, and it keeps wearing off.” Whitney said, “Every time I come here, the prices have gone up.” Alexis mentioned Stanford, a degree in history. “So you and I are roughly equals in unemployability,” she said, addressing me. Vanessa said, “My mother had a great-uncle who lived in Brazil for years, up in the central savanna. He was a rancher, raising cattle. I can’t even imagine.” Lucy said, “There were no wild years for me.” Karen said, “God, I hate São Paulo sometimes.” Whitney said, “Do yours talk about old girlfriends in a way that tells you they still keep in touch?”
Stephanie had lived for a time in Addis Ababa. She talked about the absence of modern technology; her style of complaining was to make a show of not complaining. “I almost never read e-mail, there was no Wi-Fi anywhere. Life without all that was such a revelation,” she said. “I did all this thinking that’s impossible to do anywhere else. Ethiopia is such a spiritual place.”
I went out of the restaurant into bright, post-wine afternoon light. I walked with Alexis and Rachel toward Avenida Paulista. Something was happening there. Traffic was stopped. It was a demonstration of some kind, maybe a few hundred people. Some carried signs. It wasn’t immediately clear what was at stake. I heard chanting, whistles. Rachel asked what it was. “Oh,” Alexis said, “labor grievances or something. They’re like the French here. They’re always on strike.”
Marcos, my husband’s co-worker, had the idea that I should give English lessons, and offered himself up as my first client. I didn’t hear this directly from him; my husband acted as intermediary. “Marcos already speaks English,” I said. My husband responded by pointing out that I would have to be paid in cash. It happened suddenly: I was a tutor of English. A tutor, not a teacher—teachers have relevant degrees.
I streamed some videos whose intended audience was people learning English as a foreign language. I thought that if I saw things from the student’s perspective I would make a better tutor. This led me to a video in which a Finnish teenager “speaks” different languages—that is, she babbles nonsensically while replicating the music and cadence of more than a dozen tongues. She conveys amusement, boredom, anger, sarcasm, and exhaustion without ever using actual words, always convincingly, even in “English.” This all looked like a lot more fun than actually learning a new language.
My single qualification as a tutor was the ability to speak a language whose deep grammar I had acquired before I could independently use the toilet. But apparently Brazilians did this, they hired stray Americans as language tutors; the market proved that people would pay money for instruction from someone with no training. I assumed I was less expensive than someone with training. Michelle, one of the Wives, said she knew several American women who had picked up tutoring work this way. So it seemed these Brazilians never stopped to wonder if they could turn around and teach a foreigner Portuguese.
At our first lesson Marcos told me he was looking for “refinements.” He spoke as if I were a shopkeeper and refinements were a kind of tiny, hard-to-find screw he needed to fix his watch. The fact that he knew the word refinements suggested there was little I could do for him. I asked what the Portuguese was for refinements, and the word he used translated more literally to “perfectings.” Already, the lesson was facing the wrong way.
Late at night, prostitutes waited for men in cars to stop and roll down their windows. This would happen a few blocks from our apartment. The prostitutes were tall, with tight skirts, strong shoulders, long, smooth hair. They used to be men. One lived in her car; I often saw her in the daytime on the sidewalks, shouting at people. Once, as I walked past, she spoke to me. I’m sick, she said.
My husband sat in an armchair, reading. I was in theory reading as well, but I couldn’t concentrate, and kept looking at him. Of course, I’d spent much of the day reading already. My husband’s face made an expression of trying to shut out the world in order to focus on the words in front of him. I turned to a new page in my book, and he swiped to a new page in his. He sat with good posture. He had good genes. He exercised. I asked him to read aloud something from his book. “ ‘When the British tried to levy a hut tax—a tax of five shillings to be raised from every house—in January 1898, the chiefs rose up in a civil war that became known as the Hut Tax Rebellion,’ ” he said. It was a work of economic history that purported to explain the inequality among nations. I said: “Is it considered a civil war if they were rebelling against their colonizers?”
I performed virtually all the housework—it almost goes without saying. My husband didn’t ask it of me, and he made a nominal effort, but he was at work all day and I was at home all day, so. I had no instinct for it, no homemaker gene, which, whether you want to admit it or not, some women do in fact possess. Some women do not feel especially put upon to find themselves washing a husband’s underwear; I felt put upon. But I also felt the anxiety of the non-earner, of household dead weight, and so I washed my husband’s underwear without mentioning to him, or to anyone, how strange it made me feel. Perhaps this was the start of resentment; but to resent my husband, I would have had to believe he’d stolen me away from a career, a path I wanted, and of course that wasn’t the case at all. If it weren’t for my husband, I would have been in New York authoring a fresh tweet about an exciting new blended cement—blending your cement guards against bleeding and inhibits sulfate attack—made from supplementary cementitious materials such as fly ash, hydrated lime, and furnace slag.
In New York, I was spared, because of my husband and his job. I was spared a certain kind of apartment in a certain kind of marginal neighborhood, roommates scavenged from the Internet, furniture scavenged from the street—a shipwreck life. I knew those things, I had done those things; but not for as long as I should have. Splitting a two-bedroom apartment four ways, foldouts in the living room, and always avoiding the landlord. I knew people who lived like that. The people who lived like that told me about it over coffee, over drinks, my treat. I