Zeitoun Read online

  This day, in the kitchen, Zeitoun wasn’t about to give Kathy the opportunity to tell the whole story, again, to their children. He waved goodbye.

  Aisha hung on his leg. “Don’t leave, Baba,” she said. She was given to theatrics—Kathy called her Dramarama—and all that Austen had made the tendency worse.

  He was already thinking about the day’s work ahead, and even at seven-thirty he felt behind.

  Zeitoun looked down at Aisha, held her face in his hands, smiled at the tiny perfection of her dark wet eyes, and then extracted her from his shin as if he were stepping out of soggy pants. Seconds later he was in the driveway, loading the van.

  Aisha went out to help him, and Kathy watched the two of them, thinking about his way with the girls. It was difficult to describe. He was not an overly doting father, and yet he never objected to them jumping on him, grabbing him. He was firm, sure, but also just distracted enough to give them the room they needed, and just pliant enough to let himself be taken advantage of when the need arose. And even when he was upset about something, it was disguised behind those eyes, grey-green and long-lashed. When they met, he was thirteen years older than Kathy, so she wasn’t immediately sold on the prospect of marriage, but those eyes, holding the light the way they did, had seized her. They were dream-filled, but discerning, too, assessing—the eyes of an entrepreneur. He could see a run-down building and have not only the vision to see what it might become, but also the practical knowledge of what it would cost and how long it would take.

  Kathy adjusted her hijab in the front window, tucking in stray hairs—it was a nervous habit—while watching Zeitoun leave the driveway in a swirling grey cloud. It was time for a new van. The one they had was a crumbling white beast, long-suffering but dependable, filled with ladders and wood and rattling with loose screws and brushes. On the side was their ubiquitous logo, the words ZEITOUN A. PAINTING CONTRACTOR next to a paint roller resting at the end of a rainbow. The logo was corny, Kathy admitted, but it wasn’t easy to forget. Everyone in the city knew it, from bus stops and benches and lawn signs; it was as common in New Orleans as live oak or royal fern. But at first it was not so benign to all.

  When Zeitoun first designed it, he’d had no idea that a sign with a rainbow on it would signify anything to anyone—anything other than the array of colors and tints from which clients might choose. But soon enough he and Kathy were made aware of the signals they were sending.

  Immediately they began getting calls from gay couples, and this was good news, good business. But at the same time, some potential clients, once they saw the van arrive, were no longer interested in Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC. Some workers left, thinking that by working under the Zeitoun Painting rainbow they would be presumed to be gay, that somehow the company managed to employ only gay painters.

  When Zeitoun and Kathy finally caught on to the rainbow’s signifying power, they had a serious talk about it. Kathy wondered if her husband, who did not at that point have any gay friends or family members, might want to change the logo, to keep their message from being misconstrued.

  But Zeitoun barely gave it a thought. It would cost a lot of money, he said—about twenty signs had been made, not to mention all the business cards and stationery—and besides, all the new clients were paying their bills. It wasn’t much more complicated than that.

  “Think about it,” Zeitoun laughed. “We’re a Muslim couple running a painting company in Louisiana. Not such a good idea to turn away clients.” Anyone who had a problem with rainbows, he said, would surely have trouble with Islam.

  So the rainbow remained.

  Zeitoun pulled onto Earhart Boulevard, though a part of him was still in Jableh. Whenever he had these morning thoughts of his childhood, he wondered how they all were, his family in Syria, all his brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews scattered up and down the coast, and those who had long ago left this world. His mother died a few years after his father passed on, and he’d lost a treasured brother, Mohammed, when he was very young. But the rest of his siblings, those still in Syria and Spain and Saudi Arabia, were all doing well, extraordinarily so. The Zeitouns were a high-achieving clan, full of doctors and school principals and generals and business owners, all of them with a passion for the sea. They had grown up in a big stone house on the Mediterranean, and none had strayed far from the shore. Zeitoun made a note to call Jableh sometime that day. There were always new babies, always news. He only had to reach one of his brothers or sisters—there were seven still in Syria—and he could get the full report.

  Zeitoun turned on the radio. The storm that people were talking about was still far down in Florida, moving slowly west. It wasn’t expected to make it up the Gulf for another few days, if at all. As he drove to his first job of the day, the restoration of a wonderful old mansion in the Garden District, he turned the dial on the radio, looking for something, anything, else.

  Standing in her kitchen, Kathy looked at the clock and gasped. It was all too rare that she got the kids to school on time. But she was working on it. Or planned to work on it as soon as the season calmed down. Summer was the busiest time for the business, with so many people leaving, fleeing the swamp heat, wanting these rooms or that porch painted while they were away.

  With a flurry of warnings and arm movements, Kathy herded the girls and their gear into the minivan and headed across the Mississippi to the West Bank.

  There were advantages to Zeitoun and Kathy running a business together—so many blessings, too many to name—but then again, the drawbacks were distinct and growing. They greatly valued being able to set their own hours, choose their clients and jobs, and be at home whenever they needed to be—their ability to be there, always and for anything relating to their children, was a profound comfort. But when friends would ask Kathy whether they, too, should start their own business, she talked them out of it. You don’t run the business, she would say. The business runs you.

  Kathy and Zeitoun worked harder than anyone they knew, and the work and worry never ended. Nights, weekends, holidays—respite never came. They usually had eight to ten jobs going at any one time, which they oversaw out of a home office and a warehouse space on Dublin Street, off Carrollton. And that was to say nothing of the property-management aspect of the business. Somewhere along the line they started buying buildings, apartments, and houses, and now they had six properties with eighteen tenants. Each renter was, in some ways, another dependent, another soul to worry about, to provide with shelter, a solid roof, air-conditioning, clean water. There was a dizzying array of people to pay and collect from, houses to improve and maintain, bills to deal with, invoices to issue, supplies to buy and store.

  But she cherished what her life had become, and the family she and Zeitoun had created. She was driving her three girls to school now, and the fact that they could go to a private school, that their college would be taken care of, that they had all they needed and more—she was thankful every hour of every day.

  Kathy was one of nine children, and had grown up with very little, and Zeitoun, the eighth of thirteen children, had been raised with almost nothing. To see the two of them now, to stand back and assess what they’d built—a sprawling family, a business of distinct success, and to be woven so thoroughly into the fabric of their adopted city that they had friends in every neighborhood, clients on almost any block they passed—these were all blessings from God.

  How could she take Nademah, for instance, for granted? How had they produced such a child—so smart and self-possessed, so dutiful, helpful, and precocious? She was practically an adult now, it seemed—she certainly spoke like one, often more measured and circumspect than her parents. Kathy glanced at her now, sitting in the passenger seat playing with the radio. She’d always been quick. When she was five, no more than five, Zeitoun came home from work for lunch one day and found Nademah playing on the floor. She looked up at him and declared, “Daddy, I want to be a dancer.” Zeitoun took off his shoes and sat on the couch.
“We have too many dancers in the city,” he said, rubbing his feet. “We need doctors, we need lawyers, we need teachers. I want you to be a doctor so you can take care of me.” Nademah thought about this for a moment and said, “Okay, then I’ll be a doctor.” She went back to her coloring. A minute later, Kathy came downstairs, having just seen the wreck of Nademah’s bedroom. “Clean up your room, Demah,” she said. Nademah didn’t miss a beat, nor did she look up from her coloring book. “Not me, Mama. I’m going to be a doctor, and doctors don’t clean.”

  In the car, approaching their school, Nademah turned up the volume on the radio. She’d caught something on the news about the coming storm. Kathy wasn’t paying close attention, because three or four times a season, it seemed, there was some early alarmist talk about hurricanes heading straight for the city, and always their direction changed, or the winds fizzled in Florida or over the Gulf. If a storm hit New Orleans at all, it would be greatly diminished, no more than a day of grey gusts and rain.

  This reporter was talking about the storm heading into the Gulf of Mexico as a Category 1. It was about 45 miles north-northwest of Key West and heading west. Kathy turned the radio off; she didn’t want the kids to worry.

  “You think it’ll hit us?” Nademah asked.

  Kathy didn’t think much of it. Who ever worried about a Category 1 or 2? She told Nademah it was nothing, nothing at all, and she kissed the girls goodbye.

  With the thrump of three car doors, Kathy was suddenly and definitively alone. Driving away from the school, she turned the radio on again. City officials were giving the usual recommendations about having three days’ worth of supplies on hand—Zeitoun had always been vigilant about this—and then there was some talk about 110-mile-per-hour winds and storm surges in the Gulf.

  She turned it off again and called Zeitoun on his cell phone.

  “You hear about this storm?” she asked.

  “I hear different things,” he said.

  “You think it’s serious?” she asked.

  “Really? I don’t know,” he said.

  Zeitoun had reinvented the word “really,” prefacing a good deal of his sentences with “Really?” as a kind of throat-clearer. Kathy would ask him any question, and he would say, “Really? It’s a funny story.” He was known for anecdotes, and parables from Syria, quotations from the Qur’an, stories from his travels around the world. All of it she’d gotten used to, but the use of “Really?”—she’d given up fighting it. For him it was equivalent to starting a sentence with “You know,” or “Let me tell you.” It was Zeitoun, and she had no choice but to find it endearing.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Are the kids at school?”

  “No, they’re in the lake. My God.”

  The man was school-obsessed, and Kathy liked to tease him about it and any number of other things. She and Zeitoun spoke on the phone throughout every day, about everything—painting, the rental properties, things to fix and do and pick up, often just to say hello. The banter they’d developed, full of his exasperation and her one-liners, was entertaining to anyone who overheard it. It was unavoidable, too, given how often they talked. Neither of them could operate their home, their company, their lives or days without the other.

  That they had come to such symbiosis continually surprised Kathy. She had been brought up a Southern Baptist in suburban Baton Rouge with dreams of leaving home—she did so just after high school—and running a daycare center. Now she was a Muslim married to a Syrian American, managing a sprawling painting and contracting business. When Kathy met her husband, she was twenty-one and he was thirty-four and a native of a country she knew almost nothing about. She was recovering from an unsuccessful marriage and had recently converted to Islam. She wasn’t even vaguely interested in getting married again, but Zeitoun had turned out to be everything she had not believed possible: an honest man, honest to the core, hardworking, reliable, faithful, devoted to family. And best of all, he very much wanted Kathy to be who and how she wanted to be, nothing more or less.

  But it didn’t mean there wasn’t some fussing. Kathy called it that, their spirited back-and-forth about everything from what the kids ate for dinner to whether they should enlist a collection agency to help with a particular client.

  “We’re just fussin’,” she would tell her kids when they heard the two of them. Kathy couldn’t help it. She was a talker. She couldn’t hold anything in. I’m going to speak my mind, she told Abdul early in their relationship. He shrugged; that was fine with him. He knew that sometimes she just needed to blow off steam, and he let her. He would nod patiently, sometimes thankful that his English wasn’t as quick as hers. While he searched for the right words to respond with, she would go on, and often enough, by the time she was finished, she had tired herself out, and there was nothing left to say.

  In any case, once Kathy knew that she would be heard, and heard to the end, it softened the tone of her arguments. Their discussions became less heated, and often more comical. But the kids, when they were young, sometimes couldn’t tell the difference.

  Years before, while Kathy was driving and fussing about something with Zeitoun, Nademah spoke up. Strapped into a car seat in the back, she had had enough. “Dad, be nice to Mom,” she said. And then she turned to Kathy. “Mom, be nice to Dad.” Kathy and Zeitoun stopped cold. They looked at each other, and then, in unison, back to little Nademah. They already knew she was smart, but this was something different. She was only two years old.

  After she hung up with Zeitoun, Kathy did what she knew she shouldn’t do, because clients no doubt needed and expected to reach her in the morning. She switched off her phone. She did this every so often, after the kids had left the car and she’d turned toward home. Just to have that thirty minutes of solitude during the drive—it was decadent but essential. She stared at the road, in total silence, thinking of nothing at all. The day would be long, it would be nonstop until the kids went to bed, so she allowed herself this one extravagance, an uninterrupted, thirty-minute expanse of clarity and quiet.

  Across town, Zeitoun was at his first job of the day. He loved this place, a magisterial old house in the Garden District. He had two men on the job and was stopping by to make sure they were there, that they were busy, that they had what they needed. He jumped up the steps and strode into the house. It was easily 120 years old.

  He saw Emil, a painter and carpenter from Nicaragua, kneeling in a doorway, taping off a baseboard. Zeitoun snuck up behind him and grabbed his shoulders suddenly.

  Emil jumped.

  Zeitoun laughed.

  He wasn’t even sure why he did things like this. It was hard to explain—sometimes he just found himself in a playful mood. The workers who knew him well were unsurprised, while the newer ones would often be startled, thinking his behavior a bizarre sort of motivational method.

  Emil managed a smile.

  In the dining room, applying a second coat to the wall, was Marco, originally from El Salvador. The two of them, Marco and Emil, had met at church and had gone looking for work as a team of housepainters. They’d shown up at one of Zeitoun’s job sites, and because Zeitoun nearly always had more work than he could handle, he’d taken them on. That had been three years ago, and Marco and Emil had worked for Zeitoun consistently since then.

  Outside of employing a number of New Orleans natives, Zeitoun had hired men from everywhere: Peru, Mexico, Bulgaria, Poland, Brazil, Honduras, Algeria. He’d had good experiences with almost all of them, though in his business there was an above-average rate of attrition and turnover. Many workers were transient, intending only to spend a few months in the country before returning to their families. These men he was happy to hire, and he’d learned a fair bit of Spanish along the way, but he had to be prepared for their short-notice disappearances. Other workers were just young men: irresponsible and living for today. He couldn’t blame them—he’d been young and untethered once, too—but he tried, whenever he could, to instill in them the knowledge that
if they kept their heads down and saved a few dollars a week, they could live well, could raise a family doing this kind of work. But he rarely saw a young man in this business who had an eye to the future. Just keeping them in food and clothing, chasing them down when they were late or absent—all of it was exhausting and occasionally disheartening. He felt, sometimes, as if he had not four children but dozens, most of them with paint-covered hands and mustaches.

  * * *

  His phone rang. He looked at the caller ID and picked up.

  “Ahmad, how are you?” Zeitoun said in Arabic.

  Ahmad was Zeitoun’s older brother and closest friend. He was calling from Spain, where he lived with his wife and two children, both in high school. It was late where Ahmad was, so Zeitoun worried that the call might bring grave news.

  “What is it?” Zeitoun asked.

  “I’m watching this storm,” he said.

  “You scared me.”

  “You should be scared,” Ahmad said. “This one could be for real.”

  Zeitoun was skeptical but paid attention. Ahmad was a ship captain, had been for thirty years, piloting tankers and ocean liners in every conceivable body of water, and he knew as much as anyone about storms, their trajectories and power. As a young man, Zeitoun had been with him for a number of those journeys. Ahmad, nine years older, had brought Zeitoun on as a crewman, taking him to Greece, Lebanon, South Africa. Zeitoun had gone on to work on ships without Ahmad, too, seeing most of the world in a ten-year period of wanderlust that eventually brought him to New Orleans and to his life with Kathy.

  Ahmad clicked his tongue. “It really does seem unusual. Big and slow-moving. I’m watching it on the satellite,” he said.

  Ahmad was a technophile. At work and in his spare time he paid close attention to the weather, to developing storms. At the moment he was at his home in Málaga, a beach town on the Spanish Mediterranean, in his cluttered office, tracking this storm making its way across Florida.